Tag Archives: blogger

Microsoft OS & Google Cloud Platform: Owning the Shelf Space

Google at this phase in their business and technology life cycle reminds me of Microsoft, as the trailblazers, when Microsoft was building all their products, and continually trying to own the shelf space of product sets in their desktop platform.  Now that the tides have turned, it seems their cloud platform is growing, and Google’s growth is dominant. Not only are they building out the architecture platform, but they are filling out their shelf space, building out their platform with their products, the mantra, building out the products that fit in their platform, with a preference to build verses buy, acquiring when necessary. The parallelism with Microsoft, and the desktop in the 80s and 90s scary in it’s cyclical nature.

Although Microsoft ‘virtually’ owned, and arguably continues to dominate the desktop, thick client, although loosing ground to a diversity of platforms ever since Red Hat brought Unix popularity, and Macintosh continued to grow in it’s popularity.  Look what happened at Microsoft, lots of stock options, lots of cashing in, and eventually becoming unpopular associated with a passion for their oligopoly, or as the antitrust put it, monopoly in the market of the desktop, owning the desktop platform.  Could that now happen with Google, and will we see the stock split, and other competitive offerings occur, forced by an anti-trust case by the government?  Ouch.  Well, there is no doubt, Google’s cloud platform and product set is growing.  Good for them, and good for us as consumers.  The difference, APIs, and expandability with the Google platform.  Has Google learned the harsh lessons of Microsoft, allowing the extensibility.  Will they run into barriers with partners, upgrades to the APIs, greed, and a movement to own the shelf space.

We will see.  Google, keep your cloud APIs extendable, expose as many APIs as possible, allowing third parties to easily compete and dominate the products within your architecture, even create open source code to your own products within the cloud platform, and promote as many third party products as possible leveraging all of the APIs.

The one thing I have seen so far, which is not a great sign, is trying to incorporate 3rd party products into your cloud where you have competitive offering.  I’d like to see Google step up, for example, and create widgets to WordPress to compete with their blogging platform.  Actively look to plug in third party products into your cloud architecture, avoiding the animosity third parties might have, and there won’t be a need for anti-trust down the road.  Europe is already jumping on that train with anti-trust.  I’d devise a group within Google that looks to integrate, and partner with small to mid size companies, and proactively include them into your platform.  Don’t give anyone a reason to target Google as a monopoly.

See also the article, THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google’s FTC Interrogation Not Analogous To Microsoft’s Antitrust History

Grid and Cloud Computing Going Head to Head: Profit for You

I was thinking about what was around before cloud computing.  I thought about mainframes and allocated computing cycles, then I thought about the SETI @ Home project with it’s transformation to grid or shared computing with Boinc.  Why did this seem to go by the wayside, or not maximized to become a secure cloud hosted by servers throughout the world.  A charge back model could have been created to allow users to receive monetary value for their compute cycles.  There are traditional answers which have halted it’s progress, however, there is a business model that allows anyone with a web host shared or leased, to turn a profit, such as Bloggers.

The world, from a personal computing standpoint, has progressed to laptops which have a highly utilized hibernate mode, which does not lend itself to leverage available compute cycles, because computers and the human processes that use computers are more efficient.  Laptops are just as powerful as our ‘old’ servers, and so our servers for project use have been relegated solely to the world of academia.

Although, I find extremely interesting, there is an opportunity where grid computing can have life once again, through blog hosted servers.  People who have blogs, which are hosted on servers other than WordPress.com or Google’s Blogger, have lower compute requirements for posting and serving up text and media then traditional apps hosted on web servers.  Hosted bloggers should be able to identify their utilization of their server, and calculate the ability to ‘lend’ server time.  In addition, a WordPress Plugin, for example, may be created as a User Interface, as well as a Boinc application interface.  A web server version of Boinc and a deployment binary package would need to be created and deployed on your web server.  At that point, WordPress APIs crafted as a plugin can be used to invoke the processing. Additional plugins or widgets for WordPress would allow for:

  • A widget on a blog side bar to display the results of a project your site ascribed to for grid computing, such as dynamic, refreshed charts and graphs
  • A plugin to embed short codes on blog pages to derive any information from the Boinc app client hosted on your Web Server.
  • A widget that allows YOUR customers to sign up, and short codes to display your charge back rates for allocation of your data streaming and CPU time.

Any project listed on the GridRepublic, or linked to by the Boinc Client from Berkeley is a potential client for your shared computing resource.  In fact, anyone, such as a game developer looking to lease cloud computing and storage resources may be a client.

The Boinc client hosted in a web server may, if engineered to parallel process, integrate in a cooperative of web hosted blog sites, for faster computing, and higher revenue margins.  This would be a phase two to the project, dividing up computing requirements to multiple servers.  An open source project for affiliate networking, and even Google Wallet, or coincidentally, PayPal, an Amazon company, may be used collect and then allocate funds based on a charge back formula to ‘affiliate’ web hosted blogs.  And this has never been tried before because?  Comments welcome.