I’ve been going on quite a bit recently about the changes in the economics of delivering software as a service, particularly relating to Cloud Computing - which leads me to a great article that came out this weekend from the New York Times, on the impending battle between Google & Microsoft.
SynthaSite launched our Alpha on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, and it held up perfectly - although it was not easy to scale the application architecture and we’re going to work on that - so in the interim we’re using some standard servers while we build out our virtualization infrastructure.
The future of the software is certainly in the cloud and delivered through the browser - Microsoft is not arguing about that - but they would prefer to ensure that it’s tied to the desktop in some way (and obviously IE). With the fragmentation that’s occurring as a desktop level (Linux, Mac, Ubuntu, etc), I doubt that this is a good long term strategy (in fact, they’re actually missing the plot totally) - especially given what a flop Vista is. That said, the article above is a great read!
The thing that really concerns me, is that if Microsoft really believes that applications should live in the browser - then why do they build IE only applications (such as Office Live). It’s really frustrating to not have cross browser compatibility - the browser is the new operating system, believe it or not…
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Comments On This Post
December 19, 2007 at 10:16 am
“the browser is the new operating system, believe it or not…”…true, Vinny. The sooner MS gets the picture as to where the future of services lies, the better for them (and users, of course).
I’m sure that improvements in hardware efficiency and pricing will allow services such as Amazon’s EC2 to be scaled at cheap rates. Then MS and other tech titans will realize how formidable the web is as a platform.
December 22, 2007 at 2:47 am
Hi Viny, interesting post. I’d like to learn more about your experience with EC2.
But as for MSFT and where they believe the application should live, I think they truly understand and believe it’ll live in the browser. On a financial point of view they’re simply trying to maintain their revenue base from their desktop applications as long as possible.
As soon as they open it to other browsers their revenues will start declining rapidly. So in my point of view they know very well what they do; pushing back as long as they can opening up everything in other browsers.
December 23, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Don’t know if this is the right place to ask but ” What is the difference between cloud computing and grid computing?”
Answer , any links would be helpful
March 25, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I don’t believe really the browser will be the new operating system. I think that browsers need to be more mobile compactible.
April 23, 2008 at 3:05 am
Thanks Vinny,
Very good point !
Also wanted to mention, that there’s
Cloud Computing Group in LinkedIn.
If you are interested in future directions of Cloud Computing, please join the group at http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/61513/6213F13BB1AA
For discusssion join mailing list at http://groups.google.ca/group/cloud-computing
April 23, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Sidenote - Anyone test driven Google AppEngine? I just built a sample app with it and the ease of use is great. It reminded me of EC2, with a less complicated API.
April 24, 2008 at 11:04 am
Synthasite needs a platform. I hope that the product becomes a tech-savy utility taht serious developers can use. .net intergration asp aspects and design elements and more templates that are commercially viable.
April 24, 2008 at 11:34 am
agreed synthasite needs to be upped to a tool taht a dreamweaver designer could use on the move.
May 27, 2008 at 7:44 am
the tool defeinetly needs a few more notches in the tech dept
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