Last night I attended the Crunchies award ceremony, where Facebook took top honors as the best overall start-up (See the full list of Crunchies award winners). The awards are based on a popularity contest via votes cast through the Crunchies Web site and with input from the Crunchies Committee, consisting of co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and advisors.
The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft's Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.
Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it's a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform.
David Treadwell and Ray Ozzie discuss the mesh with GigaOm's Om Malik.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)Live Mesh is essential glue for synchronizing files with all the devices a user might touch, and as a kind of information bus for identity, notifications, and other Web services. Microsoft, with its huge footprint, is uniquely positioned to provide a universal, operating system- and device-agnostic syncing foundation.
Ozzie and his team are working on a complete transformation of the back end and the front end, moving from PC-centric to multi-screen, he told me during a brief conversation at the Crunchies. Microsoft's Azure cloud service is another key part of the transformation, but is lagging behind Live Mesh. "2009 is still a learning year for Azure, just as 2008 was the Mesh," Ozzie said.
The challenge for Azure is moving the massive scale Microsoft platforms like XBox Live, to the Azure cloud-services architecture. "In 2009 Azure will be more mature, you'll see some large-scale usage," Ozzie said. But it won't be until 2010 that Azure is ready for prime time.
Ozzie is mindful of the profound changes culturally and technologically among its developers that Microsoft must undergo to realize the Live Platform and Azure cloud services vision. "When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth," he said during a Crunchies interview with Om Malik.
For a photo replay of the Crunchies, check out Andrew Mager's post.
This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war, but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.
Ray Ozzie explains Azure to CNET News correspondent Ina Fried.
As in past epochs in its 33-year history, Microsoft ties its success to the developer community, having an army of loyal, or at least well or modestly compensated, software warriors. The Microsoft mantra is: "Build a platform and an ecosystem of developers, partners, fans, and people willing to spend their money will follow." A compelling platform and the potential to reach a large audience of buyers, which Microsoft can deliver, attract the developers, who build the applications and services that attract consumers and business users.
Microsoft also now understands that its platform must span every kind of device--PC, notebook, smartphone, car, home, etc.--and offline scenarios. Microsoft missed the Web search revolution, but it's not going to miss out on the much bigger revolution--the move to the cloud over the next two decades.
Google is building a competing ecosystem from the ground up with similar characteristics and a desire to attract millions of developers. Amazon is pushing its elastic computer cloud, and Rackspace, EMC, IBM, and many other companies are trying to get a piece of the action. Most the cloud companies are focused on hosting services, but the biggest piece will be platforms-as-a-service with developers creating and running their applications for on a cloud operating system.
An early example of this trend is Salesforce.com's proprietary Force.com platform. Sun Microsystems, the company that coined the phrase "The network is the computer," has all the pieces to construct a planetary cloud but seems to be missing from the discussion. As my friend Steve Gillmor notes, Sun is on the ropes.
Openness is a major issue as the global cloud materializes. Businesses don't want to be locked into a particular cloud, and also want various clouds and services to interoperate via standards. Speaking at the Professional Developers Conference last week, Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie said that the foundation level in the operating system cloud would run in Microsoft's data center, but SQL services, .NET, and Live services can be mixed and matched by developers inside and outside of the company's datacenters. The Azure cloud is also cross-platform, but the various clouds will extract a toll and by nature it won't be dead simple to move applications using foundation services from one cloud to another.
Microsoft's cloud computing efforts have gotten off to a slow start compared with competitors, and it's on the scale of a Manhattan Project for Windows. Azure is in pre-beta and who knows how it will turn out or whether consumers and companies will adopt it with enough volume to keep Microsoft's business model and market share intact. But there is no turning back and Microsoft has finally legitimized Office in the cloud.
Ray Ozzie has a track record of slowly but surely getting things done and Microsoft is famously persistent and cash rich. But building a platform, or Internet operating system, at planetary scale supporting billions of users and trillions of transactions per day, and having fleet Google as a primary competitor will be a major test of Microsoft's brain trust and resolve. Don't be surprised to find a recharged Bill Gates parachuting into the fray as Azure evolves and the cloud war for developers escalates.
See also:
Scoble: Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to turn a corner
This week's Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured Mark Lucovsky, currently head of Google's search APIs and formerly a top technologist at Microsoft (reportedly Steve Ballmer threw a chair across the room upon being informed that Lucovsky was getting hitched to Google).
Mark Lucovsky
Lucovsky talked about making Google's APIs available to developers. The APIs include high-speed access to Google search via Javascript and RESTful protocols, peer APIs about accessing APIs, language APIs for detecting languages and translations, and hosting of third-party open Javascript libraries, such as Mootools.
"We are opening up all of Google bit-by-bit programmatically," Lucovsky said, referring to search APIs as well as the GData read/write API and Web analytics and site monitor APIs. About the only areas not yet publicly accessible are the massive compute cluster for processing data out of band, with MapReduce and the Google File System, he said.
"We are taking things we are best at and opening them up to the public," he stated.
He maintained that Google is doing the right thing for customers by providing access to its APIs and hosting tools. "We get nothing out of this. We have gone through a lot of latency work in the last quarter, and a lot of sites don't know how to do things right in terms of caching," Lucovsky said.
Of course, Google benefits when more applications and users interact on the Web by using its APIs. It's a means to selling more ads.
He was asked about Google having access to all the user data via its search APIs and hosting services. "We have access and can see what is going on, but we only look at stuff in aggregate," Lucovsky said. If an API is launched, Google can see how well it is working, such as if the cache semantics are tuned properly or which configuration is more popular, to help optimize performance, he explained.
He was also asked about cloud computing services, and working with multiple providers, such as Amazon.com's EC2 and Google's App Engine. "You can pick and choose providers with best of breed services," Lucovsky said. For example, a developer could build a hybrid application using a Google front end and some bulk storage from Amazon's S3 service. He is also betting that large-scale providers such as Google and Amazon will be the most dependable infrastructure providers because they have the depth of experience and APIs that scale.
He is optimistic that Web service interoperability and a hybrid application architecture is feasible. "I love the fact of Amazon, Google, and Yahoo with their APIs, and Microsoft out with a good trajectory and track record...it's absolutely the right way to go," he said.
Lucovsky also admitted his fondness for Microsoft Outlook e-mail over Gmail.
"The strength of client in a lot of ways is about presentation and interaction with the data or in original content creation. E-mail is the canonical client application that works great as a Web app and aweseome as a client app. I love Outlook and don't share the love for Gmail, but I like that I can go into an Apple store and check my e-mail," he said, noting that Web-based apps are pervasive and client apps are difficult to set up.
He would like it if Outlook were on every machine and you could just type in a URL. He might want to try Yahoo's open-source Zimbra e-mail, which is what Web Outlook should be, and it also has offline support.
Lucovsky was asked about Microsoft's Hailstorm project, which he worked on during his tenure in Redmond. Hailstorm was a precursor to what is going on now on the social Web, with OpenID, OpenSocial, OAuth, and other technologies. "If you squint at Hailstorm, it assumed every identity was a very rich and extensible profile," he said. It could include friends, photos, calendars, message streams, and other content. "Opening up API access to enhanced profiles is a replay of what we were talking about back in the day," Lucovsky added.
Lucovsky also had some comments about Microsoft's Live Mesh synchronization initiative. He said that the lack of compelling applications for Live Mesh makes it difficult to understand its potential. "There are a million different ways people are doing synchronization in XML, and most cases are tied to real application problems," he said.
He gave Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, some major kudos, however. He said that Ozzie and his team would be the one group he would trust to solve the distributed synchronization problem. "Mesh represents the best effort from working on problems for 20 to 25 years," Lucovsky said. He added that Ozzie has had more experience in this area than anyone. "I don't think a kid from Stanford with a B.S. in computer science has made enough mistakes (to solve the problem)," he said.
Participating in the Lucovsky interrogation were myself, Steve Gillmor, Jason Calacanis, Doc Searls, Robert W. Anderson, and Mike Vizard.
My friend Marc Canter has written a series of blog posts outlining the issues, constructs, technologies, and standards required to build out an "open mesh," as he put it. It's a kind of unified field theory for the Web.
Marc Canter
(Credit: Dan Farber)Canter has been an evangelist for a Web without walled gardens. He also has a financial stake in the open mesh. He runs a company called Broadband Mechanics that has developed a white label social network and Web site creation service that depends on open standards.
The open mesh is not Microsoft's Live Mesh. The open mesh is "made up of vendors, standards, and glue code that connects a wide range of services, applications, and platforms together," Canter said. And, it has identity at the center:
"The key foundation set of constructs, web services and APIs to support when building the mesh - is the area of profiles, personas, friendships, relationships, social graphs and groups. It all starts with humans and every construct, element and component of the open social web we're building has to do with people."
ID is at the center of the open mesh.
(Credit: Marc Canter)
"Coming out of all this is an awareness of a new kind of infrastructure - which simulates the blood veins, nervous systems, skeletons, fire hose and neural networks of the open mesh. Its about RSS, Friendfeeds, XMPP, attention, two-way APIs, OpenID, DNS-like backbones and an international approach."
Canter recognizes that a completely unified and open mesh is more theory than practice:
"No one wants to give up control of their technology - so (by definition) the open mesh must be made up of a combination of open, free protocols and technologies with proprietary APIs and technologies."
At this juncture the underlying plumbing, or mesh, for the social Web is under construction. It's a good time to bring the issues to the forefront, before the mesh blocks out more than it lets in.
David Treadwell is the special guest on the Gillmor Gang this week (check out the podcast of the show here). He is the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services, which includes the recently introduced Live Mesh. Treadwell works directly for Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has been working to put the Web, rather than the PC, at the center of Microsoft's computing universe.
Live Mesh is trying to solve a key user problem--how to mesh the desktop, mobile, and the Web for consumers and developers. For example, Live Mesh can provide core underlying infrastructure for synchronization, collaboration, and other services.
"This does represent a pretty significant advance for Microsoft, bringing the Web to Windows and Windows to the Web and connecting them super-well," Treadwell said.
I asked Treadwell if Live Mesh is designed as a core and pervasive layer for the Web, as Windows is for the desktop. "I don't think Live Mesh should be a required piece of technology, but we do view it as something that would enhance the user experience, with protocols that make it easy to connect with other services, such as Twitter." He went on to say that Live Mesh will enable a broad variety of usage scenarios, taking advantage of the standard Internet protocols.
David Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services
(Credit: Dan Farber)During the Gang, Treadwell said he was worried during the roll out of Live Mesh that the message of an underlying platform would not resonate with users and the press. It's not easy to make plumbing exciting, but people seem to be getting the idea. "Live Mesh itself has a runtime for devices for synchronization, communications and the like," Treadwell said. It is written in Microsoft's .NET, C# and with some native code, and utilizes several public protocols. The key piece is FeedSynch, Treadwell said, surrounded by other standard protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, RSS, ATOM, etc.
Treadwell was asked about the Live Mesh-Silverlight connection. "We make use of the Silverlight runtime for the media viewer on Live Desktop, but it doesn't require Silverlight," Treadwell said. "I view Live Mesh and Silverlight as orthogonal and complementary. Silverlight is the runtime for the presentation engine, and it has nothing for synchronization and low level communications like Live Mesh."
Regarding support for non-Windows platforms (Live Mesh currently requires Windows), Treadwell said, "Live Mesh synchronization capabilities require infrastructure running on specific devices, such as the Mac or Nokia phones. We will be pragmatic about getting to as many devices as we can. As long as people are willing to open up their devices and put code on there we will pursue it very aggressively. He also noted that a Linux Mono implementation of a Mesh client could be developed.
The Live Mesh stack
(Credit: Microsoft)Yesterday Amit Mital, Microsoft's general manager of Live Mesh, said Mac support would come in the next two months, and a prototype was demoed at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Host Steve Gillmor asked what he termed the "real" question: Is Live Mesh a transport to take Twitter messages into the Mesh and assign it to multiple affinity groups and express it on Silverlight clients that communicate with each other?
Treadwell responded, "Yes."
He was asked about synchronizing user and social-graph accounts by Marc Canter. "It's an interesting challenge around the class of data portability problems. We have to be concerned about user privacy and we are carefully exploring scenarios. The Mesh could be used but we have to make sure we are not putting user identities at risk," Treadwell said. "The Mesh doesn't have a contact store, friend relationships or other high-level features of Facebook or MySpace, but it can be used as low-level software to enable scenarios, such as synchronizing user and social graph accounts."
Dana Gardner asked Treadwell about supporting real-time applications, such as VoIP. Live Mesh uses "network transparent communications infrastructure," which connects devices regardless of network topology. "Any two devices with an Internet connection can communicate, but it doesn't have real-time communications capabilities. However, as we open up the SDK, it could be user for real-time applications.
I asked about the SharePoint-Live Mesh connection. "We are looking at ways for SharePoint to sit on top of Live Mesh. A scenario is to have Sharepoint documents synchronized across multiple devices. It's not available today but it's not hard to see some scenarios like that," Treadwell said.
He talked about a new feature coming for Live Mesh, the ability to do different version of media files on a per device basis. For example, you could have a 10MB photo on your desktop but a much smaller version on your phone, so you get the most appropriate experience on a device, Treadwell said. "We will need intelligent mechanisms to cache transcoded versions of files so we don't have to do it on the fly," he said.
Of course, there is the business model question related to Live Mesh. Treadwell said Live Mesh makes it easier for people to own and manage multiple devices, keeping the data and applications in sync. The financial benefit accrues to Microsoft in the case that people acquire more devices that include pieces of monetizable software and services from Microsoft. In other words, billions of devices have Microsoft operating systems, middleware, applications, and ad services.
See also: Live Mesh: Just one piece of the Microsoft's platform planMicrosoft pushed out a tech preview of its Live Mesh service, but is still holding back on delivering a more complete set of Office applications delivered from the cloud.
At this point, Microsoft has delivered Dynamics CRM as an on-demand, multitenant hosted service as well as hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint. Tim O'Brien, senior director of platform strategy for Microsoft, said this week, "We have a huge portfolio of applications that we'll over time take in this direction," meaning that Microsoft is rearchitecting much of its software for multitenancy to run in its growing number of data centers. Multitenancy allows software to be delivered from the cloud with great efficiency, running multiple customers off the same instance.
Ray Ozzie's memo detailing Microsoft's vision for a future, with the Web rather than the PC at the center, didn't shed any new light on Office for the cloud. Microsoft is focusing on its software+services model, creating services--such as Excel Data Services, SQL Server Data Services and BizTalk Services--that fuse the Web and client software.
In the memo, Ozzie stated:
Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each - the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of "personal productivity" into the realm of the "inter-personal" through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.
Ozzie is telegraphing that Microsoft will continue to add services, such as integrating a social layer into Live Mesh, but for now Office Live consists of Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business. Office Live Workspace works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, allowing users to open and save files and access them from any computer via the browser. It also synchronizes lists, such as contacts and tasks, with Outlook. The Small Business version is for setting up and managing e-commerce-oriented Web sites.
Microsoft also has Windows Live services, such as Hotmail, SkyDrive, Spaces and Writer, but nothing approaching the Office (or Microsoft Works) suite or Google Apps or Zoho.
In the past Microsoft executives have said customers aren't asking for a cloud-based Office suite. Recent shifts in the market, such as Salesforce.com integrating Google Apps may alter that view sooner than later.
For now, Microsoft appears to be sticking to its view that downloadable client software is a long way from extinction. I wouldn't argue that point, but that shouldn't prevent Microsoft from also providing a collaborative, cloud-based version of Office applications for those who prefer that mode of operation. It doesn't violate the software+services mantra. It just leans more into the cloud, which is what Microsoft is doing. Let users have it the way they want it. Of course, things like messing with the super-lucrative desktop Office business may not be in the best interest of Microsoft's shareholders in the short term, but that is a slippery slope given where software is heading.
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