Microsoft fires back!

Microsoft fired back at Google today in what is sure to the start of The Great Geek War of the 21st century.

Today Microsoft offered details for Office Web. Office Web will feature lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Office Web will be delivered in three modes: FREE to Office Live users (400 Million strong) on the Internet, via a subscription model for Office, or part of their enterprise, on-premise offering.

Office Web is a shot across the bow of GoogleApps. The online offerings of Google (and others) pale in comparison to the feature-rich local applications. Obviously, both ends of the spectrum have the points. Local applications tend to become bloatware. Online offerings are limited in user interface features. The Great Geek War is a race to see who can create the best balancing act between features and ubiquity of access.

In another post, I will discuss the real tripping point in this battle for user eye balls: data security.

Google OS: should we care?

This week was the official announcement that the Google OS was real and not just a figment of geekdom's imagination.

If you google "Google OS", there is literally an avalanche of punditry on all sides of this issue.

Should we care? Or, most poignantly, should Apple or Microsoft care?

The short answer is that everyone will care about the new Google OS effort. Here are some thoughts about how it might effect each group.

Apple

Traditional market and game theory would suggest that Apple has the most to lose in a Google OS beachhead. I disagree. Apple is moving towards network-based computing from the device end. This vertically integrated strategy has considerable strength because Apple can fine-tune the user experience based upon overall quality of networks and device computing power.

People have been proposing and postulating "net computers" for 15 years or more. No one has done it successfully because the user experience is just too good with local computing.

As the 3G networks become ubiquitous net computers will become possible and even desirable, but I think Apple can play a strong hand by building on top of its strong devices.

Microsoft

No monolith ever falls from top over night. This will be true for MS as well. Google OS is targeted directly on Microsoft.

I think the real reason that Google has countered with Google OS is that they perceive that Microsoft's Bing finally means that Redmond is serious (or competent) about Search. Google is an advertising company, first and foremost, and Google OS means that the platform vendor cannot shut out its advertising revenue.

I would look for search/advertising/operating system to merge for both these companies on the consumer side.

Will Google take significant share from Microsoft? Not initially, but look for Google to get at least 10% of the netbook sales in 2011.

I think that Google will have a harder time in the enterprise market. Nothing I have seen here looks like it solves business problems.

Consumers

Consumers get more choices. This is almost always a good thing. In the end portability of data will be the issue that people will be most worried about with any of the net vendors. How easy will it be to move my pictures from Flickr to Picassa? Can I move my Google Docs to Microsoft LiveOffice and vice versa? This FUD will slow adoption at first, but I suspect their will be a market for moving products that facilitate this lacking any industry standards.

PUE as a measure of data center efficiency

The recent business and political emphasis on "green" technology in the data center is really a throwback to good old-fashioned common sense application of effective use of capital and expense.

In 2008, the Green Grid organization proposed an industry standard methodology and metric for measuring data center efficiency, the Power Utilization Efficiency factor (PUE). Simply put, PUE measures ratio of the amount of power spent on supporting infrastructure and the power supplied to computing equipment.

PUE = Total Facility Power/IT Equipment Power

The power expended on "IT Equipment Power" is associated with servers, networking gear, and storage. The "Total Facility Power" measures the power spent on supporting infrastructure, such as chillers, air conditioning, batteries, uninterruptible power supplies and fans.

A related metric is the DCiE, which is the inverse of the PUE and represents an efficiency ratio, ranging from 0% to 100%.

A perfect PUE is 1.0, but that would imply perfect UPS systems and the like.

PUE is being popularized in the press currently by many of the big players in industry. The latest and best claim is by Yahoo on June 30 of a PUE of 1.1.

There are many issues to consider when calculating PUE, some theoretical and some practical. For example, in many data centers, incoming power circuits feed both the data center raised floor area as well as support centers, which creates difficulty in parsing power spent on either. Also, how easy is it to measure the power spent on intra-server cooling systems like on-board fans or in-rack coolers?

I had an interesting and humorous observation when I was researching PUE. There is much attention being paid to "free" chilling by using outside air when the ambient air temperature is below the rack intake temperature. This is nothing new! My very first engineering assignment almost 30 years ago was writing a maintenance manual for an air handler that did the very same thing. Only "back then" we used discrete electronics to measure the ambient air temperature and stepper motors to set the correct chiller/outside air mixture. "What goes around, comes around!"