Posted by Bill

Anyone who lived through the Internet bust at the turn of the century – you remember kids, back before we had the iPhone – rightfully is wary of drinking any “new paradigm” Kool-Aid too far ahead of the curve. That doesn’t look as if it’s going to be a problem with cloud computing.

Although numerous industry surveys and analyses indicate many enterprises and smaller businesses are moving IT assets and processes to the cloud slowly if at all – Gartner Group’s Tiffani Bova recently estimated only about 20 percent of businesses will have moved to the cloud by 2012 – the fundamental shift to cloud clearly is accelerating in tangible ways.

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal’s July 20 article detailing the huge demand for Internet servers and the cloud’s role as a primary driver of that demand. Couple that with another significant corporate cloud development — Rackspace’s plan to release an open source cloud platform it developed with NASA, a direct response to more proprietary cloud architectures from giants such as Microsoft and Amazon — and it’s clear that despite a fair amount of hype, the cloud is more than vapor. Open systems architectures and solutions are the foundation of the cloud, which itself has its greatest utility if end-users easily can move their data from one provider to another as the need or want arises – a task that closed or proprietary systems or a lack of widely adopted standards make more difficult for both provider and customer.

The next step is showing actual results from the cloud business case that prompt the corporate migration to cloud platforms and services to accelerate. Don’t expect that to take as long as it took to sop up all the excess bandwidth capacity deployed before the tech bust.

Posted by Joe

With all the talk about Apple’s stock being worth more than Microsoft, I thought it would be good to note that amidst the dark clouds hovering over Redmond, there is a little sunshine.

A Computerworld survey probing IT professionals revealed that 70 percent plan to migrate to Windows 7. This is in great contrast to the 80 percent of IT organizations that did not migrate to Vista (Gartner).

What’s interesting about the survey is that the number one reason for upgrading was to get off the Windows XP platform. I suppose fatigue happens after staring at a default-blue taskbar for nine years.

But of course, there’s more than just looks with Windows 7. There’s better integration with Windows Server and Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager and so much more.

With the Windows division finally on the right path, Microsoft needs to provide some direction to the rest of its divisions – most notably entertainment – if it wishes to see more sunny days in the future.

Posted by Bill

Social media and corporate communications may have passed a watershed last week courtesy of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who in the wake of Sun’s acquisition by Oracle became the first Fortune 200 CEO to tweet his resignation.

Schwartz did it in haiku – the content of which some observers have panned – but the fact he did it at all is unique among high-level corporate executives. Lots of companies tweet, with some using Twitter to dispense routine company news and others using it as part of a proactive customer service strategy. But as the site UberCEO pointed out last summer, most Fortune 100 CEOs are social media slackers. Few actively engage in social media of any kind and, at least as of July 2009, none had a blog.

Schwartz’ resignation tweet could help change that. The coverage of how he announced his resignation got at least as much coverage of the fact he resigned, which was not unexpected in the wake of Oracle’s takeover. Combined with the wave of tech media coverage about Bill Gates’ arrival to the blogosphere, Schwartz’ message could make other tech CEOs take notice and try to elevate significant news by releasing it first via social media.

Posted by Bill

You may be one of the giants of 20^th century business and technology, Bill Gates, but when it comes to how well your blog ranks in an Internet search? Not so much.

At least, that’s the takeaway from this entertaining, decidedly un-snarky bit of unsolicited advice to Gates following the recent launch of his personal blog, The Gates Notes.

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the site Search Engine Land, offered his advice on how Gates could improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of his blog after Googling “bill gates blog” and finding “The Gates Notes” ranked only fourth in the search.  Unfortunately for him, fake/parody Bill Gates blogs also turned up in the results with as much apparent legitimacy as the real thing.  Worse yet, results were even worse for Microsoft’s own Bing search engine: “Ugh. Your blog doesn’t show there at all,” Sullivan wrote. “Let’s get this fixed!”

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