RSSBy 'Windows Cloud,' did Ballmer mean an operating system?
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 3, 2008, 2:40 PM
3:46 pm EDT October 2, 2008 - In a move reminiscent of a different CEO named Steve, Microsoft's chief Wednesday expressed the idea of a future service for deploying applications "in the cloud." But perhaps speculators are confused by the "Windows" name.
Until the Professional Developers' Conference convenes in a little over four weeks' time, Microsoft will very likely say nothing of consequence about a concept its CEO publicly called "Windows Cloud" during a developers' meeting in London yesterday. That's by design, of course; Steve Ballmer is, for once, successfully deploying a Steve Jobs tactic of tossing a new concept to the masses like fresh meat to the wolves, and occupying their attention up until the final date of revelation.
But if we know "Windows Cloud" isn't the final name of this undefined new concept -- and Ballmer specifically said it's not the name -- then based on the information we have, it seems premature to assume that this new innovation will be, as some have already reported, a new category of the Windows operating system. Lest we forget, Microsoft already produces a competitive platform that uses the "Windows" name and that is not an operating system: the Windows Live applications platform, which the company has already associated with "the cloud."
The original concept of "the cloud" dates back to public communications network diagrams, where it was used to symbolize the portion of any wired communications link that none of the parties in the process particularly cared about. When the idea of multi-party conferencing was first sold to the public, AT&T told customers they wouldn't have to care about whose circuits they would be using to dial up and add parties to a conversation. For all anybody cared, the telephone network would reside in a cloud of invisibility.
Later, that notion was borrowed by Internet applications architects, who reasoned that the location of app servers and, later, storage devices would be inconsequential to the user of a "terminal service." It may have taken close to decade, but the term's finally caught on. And now that it's been leveraged like "information superhighway" in the '90s and "open source" in the present decade to mean far more than it should, the unspoken possibility is that Microsoft could actually be developing a platform for which the term -- the very one Ballmer said isn't the final name -- would ironically be the most fitting.
The possibility is that Microsoft is constructing an online services platform where .NET applications may be deployed on behalf of customers, and utilized from any computer or, even more likely, any device. This was, after all, the publicly stated future vision for the .NET platform when it was first unveiled before the turn of the decade.
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| Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the "Heroes Happen Here" launch event last February. |
While Ballmer only mentioned it briefly, the British IT magazine PC Pro cites him as describing exactly this concept: "You should be able to write an application and push it [into] the cloud...Write the application and put the intelligence where it makes sense, in the cloud, server or device."
Despite this very clear statement, which omits any mention of the need for an operating system, the headline for that article -- along with others that appear to have been based on it -- defined "Cloud" as a code name for an operating system. This despite the fact that Microsoft already manufactures an operating system upon which an enterprise can deploy a cloud platform: Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition.
The term "Windows Cloud" may have been coined at Microsoft in March 2007, by a developer in its Australian division named David Lemphers. He did use the concept to refer to a hypothetical future operating system that borrows the kernel from Windows Server, but is flatter and self-configuring to the needs of datacenters that want to deploy cloud services for their customers.
"So I reckon we start with a purpose built cloud OS," Lemphers wrote on his MSDN blog at that time. "We start by flattening the OS architecture. The cloud doesn't care about platform lock-in, legacy drivers, video cards; those are silicon worries! It cares about sockets and storage, and it cares about fast and reliable! Therefore, kill the abstraction tiers, write each line of code to connect service tier to kernel tier with no abstraction in between, focus on the stuff that matters in the new world, throw the old world OS thinking out (well, maybe don't throw it out, but don't let it constrain the thought process)."
After having thrown out the old-world thinking, Lemphers' concept started looking less like an operating system and more like a set of developers' tools.
"See, the tools for Windows Cloud, let's say Visual Studio Cloud Edition would be all about orchestrating other cloud services, into new services," he wrote. "It would support direct push to your cloud infrastructure, would support redeployment, secure staging, throttling, the works. It would support reverse engineering existing Web assets, all that stuff."
Steve Ballmer may never have met David Lemphers, but if he took Lemphers' idea and ran with it further, it could easily have evolved into a deployment tool that lets Redmond's own Windows Live servers act as the cloud. Applications deployed there could be accessed through any Web browser, and may require AJAX or perhaps desire Silverlight (the former WPF/E). Lemphers' idea of "killing the abstraction layer" could be enabled through a simplified form of Web services that uses a so-called "RESTful" model; and we already know that will be a feature of .NET Framework 4.0 to be demonstrated at PDC this month; that's no surprise.
So consider a scenario where it appears Windows really does move off of the client end, in this case into "the cloud." Microsoft may still want to find a way of licensing it as though it were Windows, the operating system, but only from the perspective of developer licenses rather than end users. This, to me, seems to be the most sensible and plausible scenario; what's more, it could become a very compelling service. While Amazon will soon be deploying Windows Server in its cloud, its EC2 service may lack a platform to help developers build the applications that will reside there.
I don't expect Ballmer to don a black turtleneck and blue jeans in L.A. this month, but at a time when his company really needed to get people talking about something exciting again, so far, he's doing a good job of it.
2:45 pm EDT October 3, 2008 - Though not much more was actually expected from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the whole "cloud" project at Microsoft, CIO reporter Martin Veitch was successful in coaxing from him the specific category of project this falls under. As the transcript of the CIO interview indicates, "Windows Cloud" is not an operating system.
Comparing it more with Amazon's EC2 hosting service, Ballmer used the phrase "service of services" to describe the concept. The initial phase, based on his description, would be geared around Microsoft's ability to host cloud computing services on its servers; a later phase would encompass other enterprises' ability to host similar services. That later phase may indeed involve an operating system -- most likely a special edition of Windows Server 2008, perhaps during the R2 phase -- but it would only be one component of Microsoft's larger plan.
Saying he wants to avoid a situation where customers become locked in to one provider -- even if that provider is Microsoft -- Ballmer told Veitch, "We need to design 'a service for services', if you will...Now, Version 1 that we will announce this month, you'll think about it as running a Microsoft data centre, sort of like the Amazon model. And yet we know and we've talked already with corporations and partners about going beyond it. That's why the symmetry between the server and the cloud is important. Because if we bring back the cloud features into the server platform, it's also possible for any corporation then to go into instance of its own similar services."
I think David Lemphers is owed some royalities
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|They want us to be in the clouds. Well, this always was a good method to separe you from your money.
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|with the maturiaty of other operating systems and applications offerred via open source, microsoft has a tight rope to walk.
people don't forget the screw up and the problems caused by releasing sp3 well after vista was on the open market.
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|Despite the official position saying Vista is wonderful, employees have been privately saying for at least 3 years Microsoft expects their OS to become more and more irrelevant, and that the company was working towards the, "back end," where they hope to have their monopoly move. I suspect Steve's comment was a reference to that. But they aren't stupid, they have to be careful how they word it, or EU antitrust officials might view it unfavorably.
Instead of, "We OWN your data, pay us to see it, I expect more of a, "We enable you to use your Windows Live work from anywhere, share it with anyone you want(assuming they have a Windows live account) to be able to see or modify it." And all you will have to do is pay them a monthly subscription for life. But, I suspect that as the old saying goes, "first one's free."
Or maybe they will invent, "MobileMe," or rather, "MobileYou" or "MobileMS."
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|Cloud computing....something I never want to get involved with. Be at the mercy of someone else having your data, and whose to say it will be safely kept from prying eyes, and should the government want to peek, would the people holding your data just hand it over willingly, and would they notify you that they did?
...and what if they would go bankrupt, or be bought out to someone you didn't trust, what then...
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|Cloud computing with the old tools?
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|Gee BN are fast to catch on:
"Microsoft sees end of Windows era"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7540282.stm
Posted: 4 August 2008 10:51 UK
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|*snicker* at silverlight listed above all their server tech in that picture above.
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|haha, you make a good point.
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|the future of Windows is bleak....
Balmer has his head in the clouds....
the definition of a cloud is a puff of smoke...
we all knew it was smoke and mirrors anyway...
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|"the definition of a cloud is a puff of smoke..."
And indeed, what does wind do to that puff of smoke?
We clearly saw this with the burst of the '.com' bubble, could all this cloud stuff really be a smart move, or just way to volatile after all?
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|Actually a cloud is vapor, so that makes Windows Cloud vaporware I believe.
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|Two more bits of information I forgot to add.
One of the reasons that "Windows Cloud" may be confusing to people is that it is highly distributed. By that, I'm not just talking about different servers within a given Microsoft datacenter, but across datacenters. It is also distributed in that a part needs to run on tier 1 and 2 computers. That part could just be a browser, or it could be live mesh, or whatever. The article above gets this part wrong by thinking that Windows Live runs on your PC because you see it in a browser. No, that's just you access mechanism into the Live applications that run on Windows Cloud.
A second reason it may be confusing is that you will never be able to buy the operating system, unlike Windows on tiers 1 and 2. So how does Microsoft make any money off this? The common answer is advertising, but that is only one way. Other ways are: a) Selling versions of its server applications that will also run partly on Windows Cloud; b) Selling tools that make such compound applications; c) Renting applications that run on Windows Cloud; d) Renting "transformation services" (specialized Windows Cloud applications) that will transform your enetrprise data in useful ways.
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|Yes, he is talking about a real operating system.
Right now, Microsoft has two tiers:
1, the client (e.g., Vista), is used for consumers and individuals in enterprises,
2, the server (e.g., Windows Server 2008), runs on servers in enterprises.
Both tiers 1 and 2 are actually based on the same code.
The cloud operating system will be tier 3, and it will run on servers in Microsoft datacenters. There will also be add-on software at tiers 1 and 2 that enable them to talk to tier 3. You already have a beta of Live Mesh, which is really a small add-on to Vista to enable it to talk to tier 3 datacenters which take on the task of synchronization.
Like tiers 1 and 2, the tier 3 Windows Cloud OS will be based on Vista at the bottom.
But, it will have various pieces of new software, including live mesh (for synchronization), identity, authorization, management, etc. These extend to the cloud the services currently offered in the enterprise via active directory, etc. Other stuff will be a version of SQL server for data storage.
The applications that run on tier 3 (Windows Cloud) will come in two forms: those for consumers and those for enterprises. The first will be marketed under the "Live" brand; the latter will be marketed under the "Online" brand. For example, there will be "Exchange online", "Office Online", etc.
There will be separate software adaptation layers, one for consumers, and one for enterprises, that adapt the Live and Online applications to the common underlying code for Windows Cloud. These layers also provide services for each uniquely.
The meaning of "client" will be expanded to include mobile devices running Windows Mobile. That is how your phone or PDA will synchronize, authenticate, etc. into the Windows Cloud OS.
The next version of Microsoft's tools like Visual Studio will be upgraded so that the developer can develop an application as a composite one, in which they don't know or care for each part whether it will be running inside the enterprise or in the cloud. That will all be done post-compile.
All of what I have said follows from what Microsoft has already leaked.
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|"The cloud operating system will be tier 3, and it will run on servers in Microsoft datacenters."
Yea I really hate the idea of all of my PC running on some remote Microsoft datacentre... Talk about who is really in control!
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|You clearly didn't read what I wrote. This is not about YOUR PC operating system running on a datacenter server. All you have on your PC is a small piece of software (like a browser!!) that knows how to communicate and interwork with the Windows Cloud.
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|Its nice to know that their strategy is clear as... - oh hell, why should the CEO have any real clue?
So who was it, Dell or MS who invented this cloud stuff? The first who can actually provide a definition wins.
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|It was Apple:
http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/
As a fellow Apple fanboy like myself foxfyre I'm sure you already knew this.
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|You mean, that mobile service that doesn't work... and people aren't buying?
PS: Still waiting for an answer over here.
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|You know... For all the garbage we endure from you this post made it all worthwhile :))
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|Good, then as a fanboy, tell Steve Jobs to get his head out of his @ss (or from the looks of him, keep his 'member' out of other's @sses) and release a MacBook Pro on the order of the Lenovo Thinkpad W700 with a quad core CPU (with extreme option) as well as dual hard drives, and also support for the new 4GB SO DIMMS (with at least 8GB and preferably 12GB RAM for VMs) and upgradeable socketed GPU; and release OSX in unsupported form for x86 other than Apple.
Or does he still have less confidence in his OS than we do?
Either provide a SUBSTANTIALLY beefed up portable workstation, or allow us to use other machines that can.
The only 'cloud' Apple is familiar with is the fantasy world clouding old Steve's head. There is more to IT than low-fi iPod toys and cell phones with absurdly priced useage pricing.
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|Yeah, you can't store your Windows Home Server's corrupted files on it.
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|We've been down this road before have we not? And what did we conclude? An operating system as elegant and flawless as OS X only belongs on Apple hardware... they were made for each other... like the glove for the hand, the shoe for the foot, peanut butter and jelly, cookies and milk... etc.
Placing awesome Mac OS X on a crappy PC would be like leaving a luxury mansion in the hills of Hollywood for a mud hut in a third world country. Nobody does that right? So why should Steve Jobs, the greatest and most gifted CEO of all time?
It's pointless to cheapen the Mac experience by placing Mac OS X on a second rate PC. Eww... it grosses me out just thinking about it!
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|The public couldn't AFFORD a machine with those specs from Apple!
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|Who said I use Windows?
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|"We've been down this road before have we not? And what did we conclude? An operating system as elegant and flawless as OS X only belongs on Apple hardware... they were made for each other... like the glove for the hand, the shoe for the foot, peanut butter and jelly, cookies and milk... etc."
You do realise that everything that's in a Mac was designed for the "PC" market long before Apple started using it?
The only thing that Apple can really claim any sort of leadership role in, would be IEEE 1394... But really, it's not really Apple's either.
"It's pointless to cheapen the Mac experience by placing Mac OS X on a second rate PC. Eww... it grosses me out just thinking about it!"
Seeing as there are better PCs out there with better specs then the Macs... I'm not quite sure what to say to that. Hell, my ASUS laptop had better specs then the comparable Macbook Pro at the time, and still cost me $1,000 less. More USB ports, HDMI port, eSATA, intergraded media controls, lightscribe, multi-card reader, higher screen resolution, just to name a few. Same CPU, Videocard, harddrive, RAM, and chipset. How do you explain that one?
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|Was your ASUS laptop made by Apple? Does it run Mac OS X? Didn't think so. End of story. Have a great day.
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|Nope, but ASUS makes the Apple laptops.
Story continues.... and I don't want OSX. If I'm going to run an Open Source OS, which I do, then I would like to be able to make hardware choices for myself. The fact that I happen to choose a Laptop that out performs the MBP, and happens to be made by the same company who makes the MBPs, says that maybe Apple isn't all the great after all? If they were, would they really let another company make the hardware for them?
PS: I'd still would like an answer to my question.
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