In the latest round of "I'll support your software if you support mine", Microsoft products running on VMware ESX servers are now qualified to receive support from Microsoft. That includes mission critical Microsoft software like Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint. VMware ESX passed Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program. Does that mean the floodgates have now opened and we'll see Microsoft software rapidly proliferate on VMware ESX servers?

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"Somehow" a Live Mesh client running on Windows Mobile was demonstrated at the Australia Tech Ed conference. Things have been relatively quite on the Live Mesh front and it's good to see some progress revealing itself once in a while. The Windows Mobile Live Mesh client should be available to participants in the Live Mesh beta in a couple of months or so. There's still a lot lacking in Live Mesh though.

I've always believed what's needed next is some type of intelligent device profiling that will tell Live Mesh what types of data, and in what quantities and frequency, would be best for certain kinds of devices. A Windows Mobile device might be idea for mp3 sharing unless I rarely play mp3s on that phone.

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Cloud computing, cloud storage, Software+Service, software-as-a-service -- they all present a compelling case for moving more and more of our applications into the cloud. Rather than building out your own computing or storage infrastructure in a third-party data center, why not just pay for what you use, as you use it, i.e., use cloud services like Amazon S3 and EC2, Google App Engine, and other offerings. Microsoft has its own view on hooking up .Net with cloud storage services using its own storage services, SQL Server Data Services (SQDS). What is it like developing apps using SQDS? What are the programming interfaces? Are there a schema and traditional table structures?

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Just a quick update to yesterday's post about the Google Chrome browser meaning more Web-site incompatibility. After downloading Chrome, I decided the best way to determine if I could use it would be to try it with sites I use most frequently. First site -- good. Second site -- still good. Third site -- oops, application is unusable because of a problem in the display of some DHTML. I know, Chrome's new and I should cut it some slack, but sorry, I've got work to do. I don't have time to cut yet-another-browser any slack when I have two perfectly (relatively speaking) fine Web browsers in IE and Firefox. If Chrome wants to be my browser, it has to pass muster in the sites and apps I use most.

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I hear that Google's coming out with yet-another-web-browser and the product development guy in me immediately says, "Oh great. A third incompatible web browser I'll have to develop and test with." And for what, because Google thinks they can build a better mousetrap? Does the world really need another web browser?

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We're all too familiar with outages in Google's Gmail, Salesforce.com and the RIM BlackBerry network. Recent failures by Apple MobileMe, Jott and Cuil online-delivered software demonstrate that software-as-a-service -- or Software+Services, as Microsoft would call it -- isn't just a matter of putting your software up on the Internet, gathering users and declaring your Version 1.0 ready so you can start charging for services. The three recent examples of MobileMe, Jott and Cuil clearly demonstrate other major pitfalls in trying to deliver online software. Are all online software services destined to repeat these same mistakes, or will we learn from the mistakes of others? I certainly hope the latter.

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Some development or product manager at Google's "got some 'splainin to do," announcing the Google Android cell phone OS won't support Bluetooth APIs in the Android 0.9 SDK release. D'oh! (See this Computerworld article by Dan Nystedt.) That's a blow to both developers and Android cell-phone manufacturers such as HTC, which is bringing out the Android-supported HTC Dream. This almost sounds like Google taking a page out of the Apple iPhone product manager's "these aren't the cell phone features you're looking for" handbook.

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Does the Apple iPhone 3G live up to Apple's advertising? Not according to this recorded comparison between what Apple's 3G commercial shows vs. an actual demonstration with full signal strength just outside the Apple store in Boston. As that famous Tom Petty song says, the waiting is the hardest part and it sure is in this comparison. Is it false advertising? Well, iPhone 3G network may be 2x faster than the original iPhone Classic, but it's not anything nearly as fast as what Apple shows in its commercial. Is that technically false advertising since the claims are about 3G being 2x the speed?

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Throwing more good money after bad? Or, a sign the partnership is working? Microsoft dumps another $100m into certificates for Novell's Linux operating system products. That's after an initial investment of $240m in certificates back in 2006, of which $156m (65%) Novell has already booked during the front end of the contract. That answers the questions I opened with; the partnership is working. Who's benefiting? Certainly Novell, but enterprise organizations seeking enterprise Linux solutions and their existing suppliers, Microsoft and Novell, to stand behind the products with enterprise class support. So, you have to ask the question; were the open source detractors of the Microvell deal wrong?

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Rejected! Dell gets denied at the cloud-computing goal line by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. No "cloud computing" trademark for Dell. Dell trying to trademark "cloud computing" would be like Microsoft trying to trademark "desktop computing." Too many companies use the term cloud computing to describe online services for Dell or anyone else to attempt to swoop in and trademark the term right from under the market. It would create turmoil for what is already a generalized and widely used term. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, HP and others all offer what they term cloud computing or cloud services.

Why would Dell lay claim to the term cloud computing?

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NWW Cisco Subnet has a post about bloggers writing prolifically about Cisco and cloud services. Setting the Cisco WebEx acquisition aside for the moment, Cisco could and probably will offer some type of software-as-a-service or cloud software service themselves. I would expect the best SaaS opportunities to come in the VoIP market before it shows up anywhere else for Cisco. That said . . .

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Power IT Down Day: it's a new initiative by HP, Intel and Citirx to help all of us reduce the power consumption of our workstations, computer, monitors and other electronic devices when we leave our desks at night. August 27th is the day planned to observe this "awareness holiday". Tom Simmons, area Vice President for Citrix Federal, joins me as a guest on the podcast to talk about this initiative.

On the 27th (it's not too far away), turn off all the power consuming devices when you leave your desk at night.

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Desktop virtualization concepts and benefits have already been proven out, largely through old-school remote-desktop products from companies like Citrix Systems and Microsoft. We know the benefits of standardization, managing better desktop change control, remote desktop access, desktop and data storage, and business continuity. Desktop virtualization has already begun the march to take over previous remote-desktop technologies.

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Computerworld reporter Gregg Keizer wrote today about a phishing attack which caught dazed and confused MobileMe users off balance during the disastrous .MAC to MobileMe cut over. Apparently the phishing dudes increased their take rate by timing the attack during the service transition. Apple's botched transition likely added fuel to an already burning fire. Is this the first time this has happened? Probably not (I'm only speculating) and we're likely to see this happen more frequently in the future.

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The Windows 7 team announced their new blog this week, the E7 blog, where they will keep us informed about developments with Windows 7 (W7). Er... or, will they? Seems the W7 team feels Microsoft has gotten ahead of themselves in the past by over discussing and floating trial balloons about new operating system features, implicating Windows Vista of course.

From the E7 blog:

We, as a team, definitely learned some lessons about "disclosure" and how we can all too easily get ahead of ourselves in talking about features before our understanding of them is solid.

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After the huge iPhone 3G provisioning debacle, the baffling MobileMe-upgrade morass, and now, yet another Apple e-mail outage, you have to ask yourself if Apple is really ready to deliver online software services. It's one thing if the iTunes store is down, but if e-mail or other MobileMe services are inaccessible for any length of time, users are going to scream, and they do just that on the Apple forums.

Let's face it. Running online software-as-a-service is a much different business proposition than being a software creator or consumer-products hardware company. And Apple is not the first to face this dilemma.

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At Black Hat last week, Microsoft announced both and expansion and a shift in their approach to vulnerability security information. Microsoft is releasing early information about vulnerabilities addresses in upcoming security patches through a new program called Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP). MAPP is a different kind of security information sharing program though -- it's intended for creators of security software which helps protect Microsoft products and environments. The idea is to get vulnerability information into the hands of products like intrusion prevention systems, firewalls and others, before Microsoft releases patch.

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I’ve had a lot of questions about Microsoft’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint offerings since Microsoft’s announcements at the July 08 Worldwide Partner Conference. Most of the details divulged there were just about the partner pricing, but I want to know; who owns the customer, how will support work, can anyone call Microsoft or must the partner, what if the customer switches partners, are there any SLAs, what are the differences between the deskless and full product offering? Those are just a few of the questions we get answered in this podcast interview with John Betz, Director Product Management for Microsoft Business Online Services.

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Network World writer Tim Greene has a good piece on Juniper's announcement that it can now use the Microsoft NAP client in place of Juniper's own UAC client. That makes installations using Juniper's UAC for NAC easier to deploy since they don't have to use the UAC client on machines running Windows Vista and XP SP3. But this is a one-way announcement when it comes to Microsoft NAP as it's what enables NAC client machines to participate in Juniper's UAC solution (and Trusted Computing Group's TNC architecture), not the Microsoft-based NAC product solution. Microsoft has a dual NAC strategy; expose the NAP client for 3rd party NAC solutions, and deliver its own Microsoft-centric NAC solution.

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As more of our applications migrate into the cloud, some interesting questions for development rise up. What about development? How will developer use cloud services in the development process? How do you attract developers to develop on your cloud services? How much will cloud services cost you if you use cloud services in the software development and QA testing process?

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This week I'll be attending Black Hat in Las Vegas, the annual security show that brings in security practitioners and n00bs alike from all over the world. Xen Hypervisor, Cisco gear, Wi-Fi, browsers, Google Gadgets, DNS and more, are all expected to come under the hacking microscope to expose the latest security vulnerabilities and hacking methods. I'm particularly interested in Web 2.0 and hypervisor-type attacks, given how rapidly these two areas are expanding but suffer the typical malady of security languishing as a secondary consideration.

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On the latest installment of the Converging On Microsoft podcast, Donald Lutz, CTO of Technetronic Solutions (one of a number of companies I advise), joins me to talk about building .Net applications using a SOA-based architecture and moving apps to the Software+Services model. Donald shares his views about building SOA and cloud services that don't look like typical applications. BizTalk isn't something we hear Microsoft talking about as much but it is a vital element of SOA and distributed cloud applications. If you are architecting or building SOA-based applications, you'll find this interview very interesting.

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SaaS, PaaS, Software+Services, and now Microsoft's Midori (next gen OS) all spark the debate of whether our data is secure in the cloud. In a Slashdot discussion, debate quickly switched from discussing Midori into the distrust of storing personal data in the cloud. A Business Week article sited security of your data #4 on its list of myths about SaaS. At some point, and some point soon, we're going to have to address the security concerns of cloud services, cloud storage and how customers know their data is secure.

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Microsoft announced it's working with Sony of America and Toshiba Asia Pacific to pre-install Windows OneCare on new PCs. I say yippee because I'm tried of uninstalling Symantec slow-ware from new PCs. I long ago swore off Symantec's products because of their poor performance and how they slowed down (brought to a crawl in many cases) my PCs. OneCare on the otherhand has been a pleasure to use. I've have very little problems with OneCare and the performance hit is relatively marginal compare to Symantec and McAfee.

ONECARE PLUSES

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Cuil and MobileMe, two online SaaS services that struggled to get out of the gates the past few days and weeks. Both experienced different types of problems, but they were both very visible problems for their respective companies. First, Cuil. I blogged yesterday that Cuil was returning some odd results, paring James Mitchell Ashley's old picture with some of my content. Well it turns out that if you just kept searching a bit more, you'd start to see even wackier results that just didn't make any sense. A search engine that doesn't produce accurate results won't last long once people have 1, 2 or 3 bad experiences and go back to whatever they were doing before.

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How many cool ways is there to spell "cool"? Kewl is very popular amongst chat and gamers, and now we have "cuil". Some ex-Googlers decided to give Google a run for their own money by creating YASE (yet another search engine) called www.cuil.com. Like Google, Cuil starts out with a very nondescript front page where you enter your search term, though Cuil sports a black background to differentiate it from Google right up front. That's where the differences start, and it gets better from there.

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With the new fiscal year beginning, I think we'll see Microsoft's cloud announcement sometime in the next three months, no later than the end of the year. Last week Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, stood in front of the 08 Financial Analysts Meeting hinting at Microsoft cloud initiatives as "progressively move to embrace the cloud", "significant announcements, significant efforts" and "broader in scope and different than our competitors". An obvious reference to Amazon EC2/S3 and Google Web App Engine.

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If you aren't using the Xobni plugin for Microsoft Outlook, then its time to upgrade from stone knives and bear skins to some new email + social networking tools. I had the pleasure of interviewing Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina earlier this year about Xobni, back when it was still in closed beta. Xobni's one of those innovative products I wish I'd thought of. It digs into your Outlook pst/ost files and pulls out valuable nuggets that help you use email more effectively. In addition to the podcast, I've also recorded a demo of Xobni and delved into some of the deeper capabilities on my personal The Converging Network blog.

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It's a marginal gain but a gain none the less. The June numbers show Microsoft's Live Search gained 0.3 percentage points, putting them at 9.2 percent. Google lost that same amount. (Yahoo also gained.) Is Microsoft's Live Search strategy working?

Frankly I'm surprised Microsoft is already at 9.2% of the U.S. Web search market. Obviously an acquisition of some or all of Yahoo by Microsoft would greatly accelerate the quest for market share but that's anything but certain these days. While 9.2% is great progress so far, gaining only three tenths of a percent each month will make Live Search's climb up a slow one. Microsoft's got to figure out new ways to pull users off the Google home page and onto Live Search.

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The Live Mesh barn door was open long enough for the guys at jkOnTheRun to give us a peak at Live Mesh running on Intel Macs. Guess what, it looks a lot like how it works on Windows Vista machines but still retains the Mac's overall look-and-feel. For the most part, the same capabilities are present on the Mac version as are in the Windows version. Remote desktop control isn't there yet but it's possible it could be added since this is still pre-beta bits.

I have to commend the Live Mesh team at Microsoft on two fronts. First, they chose to go the way of Google and offer Live Mesh services in beta form until they are ready.

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