Powers Unfiltered

OK, OK, the joke is old — no Microsoft product is worth using until Version 3, har-dee-har, and maybe it’s a cheap shot at a product just awakening in beta.

But one of our favorite Microsoft smart guy bloggers, Don Dodge, is posting about AdCenter like it’s some kind of moneymaker for Microsoft, and I have to say — what? This is like waiting for Zune to move the dial for Microsoft’s stock. The umpteenth-place entry in a two-player market is not “big financial news,” and will not make a noticable impact until some major changes are made. AdCenter is a weak offering, MSN Search is losing market share, and the reason is performance. Neither AdCenter nor MSN Search work as well as competing offerings. The combination of the two is just not compelling for ad buyers.

Don notes that “the real money is made by delivering ads,” by which I assume he means “the real money is made when the ads delivered are so relevant and helpful that people click on them rather than just looking at the non-revenue search results.” In that regard, my experience indicates that Microsoft has a long, long way to go. Don (and Ballmer and Gates and everyone else) can tout the “rocket science” in search and ad serving all they want — they’re right, these are hard problems — but this Microsoft offering still needs more rocket scientists.

As a loyal member of the Microsoft Partner Community, I signed up for Microsoft AdCenter when it first became semi-open for business in June. The ads I placed on Microsoft’s service generate negligible traffic for us, while Google ads generate a ton and Yahoo ads fall somewhere in between. I use approximately the same words in each service, and the results are strikingly different. My semi-quantitative analysis shows that Google delivers far more hits — substantially more than I would expect just by allowing for the respective market shares of Google and Microsoft in the search market. (I say “semi-quantitative because my hit tracker gives incomplete results, and each service provides different reporting tools.)

Here’s a simple illustrative example: When I buy the search phrase “grid computing,” I want people to click on a Digipede ad that leads here. With Google AdSense, buying that phrase costs a lot, and I get a lot of hits (249 clicks on our ad in a given recent period from that single exact search phrase, and we could have had more if I had not limited our budget). When I buy “grid computing” at Microsoft’s AdCenter, it’s cheap, and I get — bupkus, zilch, nada (ok, 7 clicks to be more precise, and that’s without coming CLOSE to our budget). Yeah, part of that is overall search market share, but part of it is clickthrough rate, and part is the profile of users searching for this particular phrase — and taken together, I do better on Google, by a lot. (Yahoo is somewhere in between; Microsoft is a distant last.) To me, just a big dumb entrepreneur buying ads, this looks like Google is doing a (much) better job serving my ads to an audience that cares. (Yes, these are Search Ads, not the newly available Content Ads Don posted about; we have no experience with the latter at AdCenter yet, but I look forward to trying them out. Note that this new offering, again, is strictly catch-up with long-established offerings on Google and Yahoo.)

Also the signup process was simpler at Google, and guess who’s legalese was less intimidating and obtrusive? And while I’m piling it on, Google and Yahoo have reporting that’s more intuitive (and in Google’s case, more responsive), Google allows integration with the very-cool Google Analytics service, both Google and Yahoo provide better control over where and when your ads run, and they make it easier to recover a lost password (I had to go back to guessing at AdCenter; I have no idea where my password was emailed by the AdCenter password recovery robot, but it wasn’t to me…).

In its current form, AdCenter is an also-ran, which is a shame — one might expect that the Microsoft-centric target audience I’m looking for would use MSN Search more often than many other audiences would. I will tell the “Chief Media Revenue Officer” (I kid you not) the same when her contractor gets around to sending the satisfaction survey she promised me.

I’ll be happy to post again after we’ve had some experience with the added content ad functionality Don reported. In the meantime — wake me when we get to 3.0.

Today marks the beginning of a new tradition at Powersunfiltered.  Each month (or more likely, whenever I feel like it) I will present the Powersunfiltered Ferdinand Foch Award to an entrepreneur whom I admire for, well… you’ll see. 

Ferdinand Foch, the French general, field marshall, and hero of World War I, issued a famous dispatch from the Marne, which translates (approximately) as:

“My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.”

It is difficult to come up with a more fitting quote to put at the top of the entrepreneur’s day planner every single day.  “Good morning!  Everything still screwed up?  Cool.  We still badly outgunned?  Excellent.  Charge!”

(And for the PC crowd preparing to berate me on my lack of sensitivity to the horrors of war, I provide this convenient link to the definition of the word “analogy.”)

For August 2006, the entrepreneur who embodies this “bring it on” attitude best is Mr. Matt Heaton of Bluehost.com.  I’m Matt’s customer at Bluehost; Digipede CTO Robert Anderson recommended Bluehost as a place to host my blog, and I know better than to debate Robert on such matters.  I don’t know Matt, and have never even corresponded with him — he’s got enough on his mind.  He’s got a new baby (about six weeks old), a growing business, numerous voracious competitors (large and small), puny margins, hardware failures, software failures, and a genuine customer service crisis.

There are lots and lots of value-added goodies that a hosting service can provide to differentiate, and Matt’s been very innovative in providing those; more are in the works.  But in the final analysis, hosting is about reliability — whatever I put online needs to be online, or nothing else matters.  Bluehost has had several outages in July and August.  Matt’s been beset by flakey routers, power failures, Linux bugs, firewall nightmares, and I think a plague of frogs.

Matt’s response?  Expand.

While buying replacement routers and compiling their own Linux kernel and changing out firewall software and generally rebuilding the plane in midair, Bluehost is also acquiring more space, more customers, more equipment, more employees.  Matt keeps his customers in the loop about all these decisions, through his blog and through direct email to customers.  He’s passionate, direct, and he’s this month’s winner of the Powersunfiltered Ferdinand Foch Award. 

I wish him all the best in delivering on his many promises — and in the meantime, keep your damn service up, OK Matt?

[Nominations for future awards are welcome; keep in mind this award is for both attitude and achievement — few would now remember Foch if he had not attacked, but no one would remember the quote if he had lost.  The awards committee is me.  I accept nominations from anybody, but I actually pay attention to nominations of entrepreneurs by other entrepreneurs.  All decisions by the awards committee are capricious, arbitrary, and final.] 

I spent portions of the last three days at the Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP) summit in Redmond.  Thanks and congratulations to the whole VSIP team for a worthwhile and fun event!

VSIP is another of the Microsoft partner programs that can deliver great value if you’re patient and willing to work a bit.  As a continuing public service, I will now distill the information about the program you SHOULD be able to get from the VSIP Web site, but you can’t, because their Web site is almost as bad as the main Microsoft partner program site. 

(Without breaching the fearsome Microsoft NDA, here’s some feedback from a Microsoft manager at yesterday’s morning session, who shall remain anonymous:  “I would rather swim in a vat of squid than use the current VSIP Web site.”  Believe me, I can’t make this stuff up.  But at least THIS team is aware of the problems and is working to fix them; is anyone listenting at partner.microsoft.com?) 

VSIP is for partners that extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and related development products.  There are various levels of program participation, and you get more benefits by moving up from Affiliate to Alliance to Premier.  There are a variety of ways to “extend the capabilities” of VS, from integrating new programming languages, to providing macros and add-ins, to delivering UI components, to writing libraries with new capabilities.  The Digipede Framework SDK, for example, extends Visual Studio through libraries that enable developers to write grid-enabled applications using the same tools and programming paradigms they already use.  (It’s part of the free Digipede Network Developer Edition — ask for one here today!)  You can read more about VSIP here, or at least that link works as of this moment, but navigation beyond that is at your own risk.

Now it’s certainly true that Digipede fits as closely with other Microsoft products as with Visual Studio.  So why do we spend our precious limited bandwidth with VSIP? 

Because these guys get it.  They listen.  They work hard to provide value for partners.  They understand that Visual Studio wins more market share by having great extensibility and great partners helping to extend it.  They are building a great ecosystem where partners really matter.  They have access to millions of developers on the Microsoft platform, many of whom we’d like to reach, and the VSIP team is both responsive and proactive in helping us reach those developers.  When developers have more choices and better tools, everybody wins. 

And by the way — Note to Allison Watson — THESE GUYS know how to feed partners!  Allison, see if you can recruit Laura Templeton and Amy Bang to help manage the next Worldwide Partner Conference.  (If you’ve missed the reference here, the definitive description of the packs of hungry partners prowling the halls of the last WWPC can be found in Dan Ciruli’s now-classic post, “Allison Watson Owes Me Lunch.”) 

When I say “these guys listen,” that was reflected in the way they approached this entire summit.  At some (ok, many) Microsoft meetings, a typical one-hour session is 59 minutes of PowerPoint and fast talk, concluding with a URL (that might or might not point to a valid address) where you can get more information.  While there was a bit of that in some of the VSIP presentations, mostly there was a fair bit of give-and-take with the attending partners.

My favorite presenter at this event, Luca Bolognese, is apparently well aware of this phenomenon.  He began the last 45-minute section of the day as follows, absolutely deadpan:

“I have four hours of material to present, and I will try not to go over four hours.  My presentation is in three parts, any one of which I may easily screw up, so please hold your questions until the end so I do not have to start over.” 

His presentation was actually excellent, he took questions as he went along, and he finished on time.  I can’t tell you what he’s working on, but he can, and it’s slick.  Check out his blog (although it’s not updated recently), or check out the LINQ Project, and if you have a chance to hear him speak, do it.

Other slick things I can’t talk about are talked about by Microsoft bloggers like Paul Andrew , who is overseeing the wonderful new Windows Workflow Foundation, and Richard Turner, who manages the invaluable Product Formerly Known as Indigo (Windows Communication Foundation).  These are two core pieces of .NET 3.0.  Let me second Robert W. Anderson’s request:  Free .NET 3!  Paul and Andrew — somehow, please find a way to  release .NET 3 independent of (and before) Vista! 

I’ll wrap this up by saying – if your product touches Visual Studio in any way, this is a program worth considering, and a team worth getting to know.  
 

As my loyal readers know, I recently spotted an article called “Linux is optimal OS for grid computing, says Oracle,” and I took a swipe at it because, well, I disagree. Today I’ll take a little more time to explain my comments about the Microsoft platform, and why we’ve bet our company on grid computing for Windows.

First, think for a minute about why grid computing is a good idea at all. Grid computing rides on top of some of the biggest trends in the IT industry:

• Networks get faster faster than CPUs get faster. Result: Every year, there’s a larger set of problems that can take advantage of distributed computing.
• 32-processor SMP machines are essentially the top of most product lines; these specialized machines are sold in such low volumes that their prices often exceed $1,000,000. Result: Raw processing power is vastly cheaper to buy in single- and dual-processor systems. These are produced in huge quantities, resulting in delightful economies of scale. Such boxes can be assembled into clusters, grids, or both.
• Building applications that take advantage of SMP boxes gets vastly harder the more CPUs you’re trying to manage, and there are very, very few applications that can take advantage of more than 8-way boxes. (John McCarthy famously summarized the situation: “Such systems tend to be immune to programming.”) Result: There are tremendous incentives to use a programming model that works well for many separate single- and dual-processor boxes.
• From Web services to enterprise SOA to a variety of Software as a Service models, more software is being exposed to more users as services every day. Result: Good services that deliver value (in the enterprise or beyond) soon become popular, and as a result consume higher and more variable amounts of computing resources. Even mildly compute-intensive services require a scalability strategy, and are a great fit for grid computing.
• Datacenters are filling up with ever-denser racks of blades and 1-U dual-processor boxes, which can be configured into clusters and/or grids. In many situations, rack space, floor space, power, cooling, and administration have all become more important limitations on scaling than hardware cost. Result: Grid computing technologies that can combine clusters with loosely-coupled resources outside the datacenter (including underutilized department servers and idle desktops) can greatly improve the economics in such situations.

These trends all cut in favor of grid computing — on any OS (or many OSes). Indeed, the above analysis says — “If it were easy, everybody would do it.”  Yet not everybody is doing it. Grid computing remains the “technology of the future,” as it has been for the past decade.  But with all these wonderful trends providing strong incentives toward grid computing, what’s been holding it back?

The answer is applications. Full stop.

It’s way too hard to adapt applications to most grid offerings.

And the applications are on Windows.  And the grid community has ignored mainstream Windows applications for too long.
Once again, as I brace for another episode of “Attack of the Rabid Penguins,” let’s get a few things clear.  Linux is a fine operating system.  For that matter, Mac OS X is a fine operating system, and there are plenty of others.  I’m not a “Microsoft suck-up,” and I don’t pull punches when Microsoft screws up. And I know that there are plenty of scientific and technical computing applications in academia, government, and enterprises that run on Linux, and OS X, and UNIX flavors of all sorts.

But I can count. When it comes to mainstream business applications, applications that run Web services, applications that run on the desktops and servers of CPU-hungry power users at businesses small, medium, and large — it’s a Windows world.

And when it comes to tools that let developers productively adapt those applications to the grid, it’s clearly a Microsoft world.  Microsoft has been about developers and developer productivity longer than it’s been about anything else, and that’s the Next Big Thing in the grid world.  (Anyone interested in recent figures on how Microsoft is doing with developers can check out this eWeek article, aptly titled “Microsoft: .NET Beat Java; Who’s Next?”.)
Find the applications.  Make it easy to adapt them to the grid.  Watch grid adoption soar.  Stay tuned as we make this happen!

Derrick Harris recently did an interview with me for a story he published today in GridToday.  I think he did a good job — Thanks Derrick!

Then Derrick went slightly overboard and decided to do a separate story about me, in which he claims “The one thing that never ceases to amaze me when speaking with Digipede CEO John Powers is how frank he can be.” 

Look.  I learned at a very young age, and I continue to learn every day, that being open with people is vastly better than hiding things — from co-workers, customers, partners, the press, or competitors.  If frankness is news in this industry, so be it — I choose to take that as a compliment, so thanks again! 

 

Digipede Evangelist Kim Greenlee is headed to Fresno, where she’ll be the featured speaker at the Central California .NET User Group meeting on Wednesday, August 9.  The meeting starts at 6:30 and will be held at California State University, Fresno (Business Center, room 194).

Kim’s talk is entitled From Threads to Grid – Application Scalability and Performance for the 21st Century — a topic near and dear to the hearts of many .NET application developers.  And she’ll be handing out Digipede Network Developer Edition mini-CDs to five lucky attendees.

Worth the trip! 

Mike Gunderloy,  developer / author / publisher of the Larkware Web site, reviewed the Digipede Network Developer Edition yesterday.  He dug it:

…What The Digipede Network brings to the table is a polished way to set up a .NET-based grid on your own network, ready to undertake distributed computing jobs at a moment’s notice. When you install their product, you get a well-designed layer of management infrastructure together with code hooks that make it easy to submit piece of work to the grid.

Right you are, Mike!  And as for our frequent claims about how easy the Digipede Network is to get up and running — what about that?

Any good .NET developer should be able to get Digipede up and running, and have a piece of their own key application distributed across multiple machines, in less than a day.

Thanks Mike!

I adapted the title of this post from an article that appeared this week in PC Welt, entitled “Linux is optimal OS for grid computing, says Oracle.” (I found it through the diligent grid coverage provided by Greg Nawrocki in Grid Meter — thanks Greg!)

The article is primarily coverage of a presentation by Guy Cross, director of Business Development for Oracle’s Asia Pacific Linux Business Unit; the article is a little sketchy, and one hopes Mr. Cross did a better job of linking the platitudes with the conclusions. For example:

To leverage on Linux and the grid, Cross advised enterprises to take the following steps:

1) Standardize. Take inventory to find out what you are running, and ask if the vendors will be around in 10 years, he said. “Do research and find out what the vendors are rallying behind.” The answer, he said, lies in the “O3 zone’ ” open source, open standards and open systems.

2) Consolidation.  Have a 360 view of your business and start to migrate to do more with less, so that there is less cost to manage. Start at the hardware layer and then move to the database and then applications, to higher levels of abstraction.

3) Automate. Take advantage of grid computing by deploying groups of small, cheap servers, or leverage on Oracle on demand to have software delivered as a service, so that the enterprise can focus on its core business.

What?

1. Standardize. OK, and you do that by trying to guess who will be around in ten years?? Maybe industry giants like Compaq, or Digital Equipment, or Silicon Graphics, or Lotus… Get serious. Any tech purchase made today based on a 10-year analysis is doomed; any grid project that doesn’t pay for itself in one or two years isn’t worth funding — something far better will be along in less than two years. This is typical big-company FUD, nothing more.   By the way — what’s the over/under on Oracle’s continued independent existence? If it’s ten years, please excuse me, because I have to call my bookie.

And as for the “rallying” of vendors — vendors are rallying behind two separate banners. First (yes, first — go check), there’s Microsoft and .NET. Second, there’s the “O3” banner that Mr. Cross identifies, with dozens (or thousands) of sub-banners that permit vendors to claim to be rallying while they’re actually feuding.  And who advocates rallying behind a big, established company working (a bit) with open source? Why, it’s the head of bizdev for Oracle’s Linux group in Asia.

2. Consolidation. Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. The tech industry was born fragmented, and has been fragmenting ever since. Over and over I hear people say “oh, big enterprise IT departments are consolidating — they want to do more business with fewer vendors, because it’s easier to manage.  They want to have fewer platforms, fewer “special projects,” more focus, simpler systems, more control.  Time to standardize and consolidate — you’ll sleep better.”  Guess who I hear it from?  Not from CIOs, who understand where innovation comes from.  Not from department managers or application owners who are in pain and need a solution instead of platitudes.  No — I hear it from big incumbent vendors (and occassionally the analysts they employ).  Every few years we hear about a new giant wave of consolidation, and when the dust clears there are more platforms, not fewer; more vendors in more categories, not fewer; more new technologies to master and monetize, not fewer.  Note to Mr. Cross — that’s a tech trend called “innovation.”  It’s a tech trend frequently resisted by big incumbents too accustomed to comfy margins. 

3. Automate. Automate? What does building a grid using “small cheap servers” have to do with automation? And where does Linux come into it? More small cheap Windows servers are sold every day than small cheap Linux servers. You lost me. Again. And as soon as we’re lost, who advocates for just handing everything over to Oracle so we can focus on, um, something else? Why, it’s the head of bizdev for Oracle’s Linux group in Asia.

My turn:

To leverage on economics and the grid, Powers advises enterprises to take the following steps:

1. Standardize. Take inventory of your computers — what OS do most of them run? Take inventory of your applications — on what platform do most of them run? Take inventory of the skills in your architecture and development group — on what platform are they most productive? Then choose a grid technology that leverages those resources and skills.

2. Embrace fragmentation. Empower departments and application owners with control over resources and development direction. Support them — don’t ignore them.  Start with the applications, not the hardware. Hardware is cheap and getting cheaper! Deploy applications on your grid in rank order of greatest benefit/cost ratio.

3. Simplify. Stay away from grandiose visions that require ten years. Acheive value now by reducing complexity in grid design and implementation, and by keeping the solution focused on where deploying applications to the grid provides the highest benefit/cost ratio.

For each of these steps, Windows dominates Linux in most enterprises as the right OS for grid computing. With a few exceptions, enterprises have more Windows hardware, more Windows software, and more Windows development expertise than anything else. Grid computing is important — but not important enough to overturn platform decisions already in place. “Tear everything out so you can do grid computing?” I don’t think so.

In the end, a grid is for applications, and applications are written in .NET for the Windows operating system.  (You may want to check out the latest figures if you don’t believe me — kudos to Darryl Taft of eWeek.)  Are there exceptions?  Sure.  Enough to make Linux the “optimal OS for grid computing?”  Check back with me in ten years and let’s see.

Not posting much lately because I’m on vacation with my family in Washington, DC. It’s the kids’ first trip Back East (time to see some REAL American history), and we’ve been having a great (exhausting) time. For me, one of the unexpected highlights was seeing SpaceShipOne in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (where I personally could easily spend the whole five days in DC). I had no idea Burt Rutan’s X-Prize winner was here, but it’s hanging right where it belongs — next to the Spirit of St. Louis (lest you think nobody in the government gets it anymore — somebody does).

And yes, the Natural History Museum is fun, too.

I’ll try to have more insightful stuff in a week, and maybe some more fun stuff in the meantime.

OK, I promise to stop posting about the WWPC soon, but it was a very productive event for us.

In addition to the many sessions I’ve already described, I had a chance to sit down with Darryl Taft of eWeek.  While he was in Boston covering the Microsoft event, he took the time to interview me about our work with Microsoft in grid computing. 

Darryl’s article came out today, and his take on our place in the Microsoft ecosystem is quite insightful.  While I hate to think we’re anybody’s “secret weapon” (part of my job is to make us less of a secret!), I think his article is right on target.

Thanks, Darryl!