I mostly agree with what he says, except I think his underlying premise is wrong:

It’s good for entrepreneurs and good for users to have angel investors caught in hell. When they feel they have to spend more money to stay in the game, that’s good for all of the rest of us (press, users, entrepreneurs).

First, there really is a place for the classic angel – that is, the Ron Conway kind that is in it to help entrepreneurs succeed.  I don’t think it helps anybody if these angels are “in hell.”  The angels that Robert talks about are really VC in my book and frankly I don’t think they belong “in hell” either.  Now some do, of course . . .

Second, more money thrown at entrepreneurs is not in and of itself a good thing. On some level it gets more people building companies, but does it really get more people innovating?  Before the “dot bomb” hit, the same thing was happening in VC.  Everyone and their brother formed a venture company and all sorts of things were funded that were patently ridiculous.  That was a part of why the crash happened.

24 hours later and my GAFD account worked as a logon – and more importantly, my account was integrated – with just about everything.  14 hours after that and I even have my Google Voice account and phone number ported into my GAFD account.

Awesome.

A couple of points:

1. Once you migrate your accounts, it will appear that you need separate browsers for your accounts.  You don’t, you just need to read the following and do what it says for each of your accounts:  http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=182343
2. If you want to move your Google Voice account, fill out this form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA.  They say it could take two weeks, but for me it was 14 hours.

GAFD being more integrated is actually a great help because I’m now managing one fewer contact list.  Now I’m just hoping for a Google desktop app that can take calls.

PDC’s are quite valuable to attend (access to Microsoft product teams, exposure to their roadmap, opportunity for light-bulb” moments, etc).  That said, I may decide not to go after the session list is released – a simple balancing of priorities.

Anyway, I’ll likely keep my registration – I would actually love it if Microsoft could change my plans about Azure this October.

Are you going? Or not? If so, please share your reasons.

• Hosting HTML
• Context menus
• WCF and REST enhancements
• Support for RIA Services
• Drag & Drop
• Running out of sandbox for trusted apps
• Sharing components between .NET 4 and SL 4

Lot of other things too.  I’m excited to start using this.  Also a shout out to Tim Heuer – he has helped me on a few things before and I got a chance to meet him today.

Those of you following NewsGang will know why I am very excited about these Silverlight developments.

It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner. 

This last point is an important one.  Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud.  While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit. 

The offering was rich then, but since then Microsoft has continued to push these offerings forward dramatically. 

At the time, my biggest concerns were the one-size-fits-all approach to their provisioning model and their lack of full trust (two things that could make it harder to deploy the Digipede Network onto Azure).  Today those issues have been taken off the table and help support many more use cases, opening up Azure even more to non-Microsoft technologies and fortifying the extremely important IT bridge.

So what are the improvements in openness?

Allowing full trust opens up the door to, well anything.  Unmanaged code,  PHP, MySQL, Java, TomCat, etc. can all run on Azure.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic demonstrated a WordPress instance running that way.  Kind of anti-climactic, because it would have been a big deal if wordpress.com was moving to Azure.  Simply running a WordPress instance isn’t really that interesting.

Custom VM images are also coming to Azure which will make it much easier to put whatever you want on a VM and deploy it efficiently.

For IT?

Too many items here to enumerate.  SQL Azure integrating into SSMS; Azure integrating into MOM; SQL synchronizing with cloud instances; (this list really does go on and on . . .).

Another important part of this IT bridge?  Not Microsoft’s new App Server, AppFabric.  Though I am excited about this – it is something that has been missing from the Microsoft stack – the key point here is that it runs on premises and in Azure.

Conclusion?

These new features in Azure push Microsoft out even further than the other cloud vendors.  No one else has the depth and breadth in tool support and service offerings.  No one else is innovating so quickly on so many parallel fronts. 

Will Amazon and Google cede the space?  Of course not, but I think they’ll need  to reposition their cloud brands.

GAFD is pretty cool.  It allows you to put many services (i.e., mail, calendar, docs, sites, chat) behind your own domain.  Other Google services don’t exactly fit this model, and so they aren’t supported.  For example while App Engine does allow you to use your own domain, you probably don’t need to host your App Engine development portal from within your domain.  Not too big a deal.

But for the services that use your contact list (e.g., Voice, Wave, and Reader), I really don’t want to use my GMail address and certainly not the contacts list I have there.

I am at a loss to understand why Google doesn’t have a corporate policy that products must support GAFD.  Isn’t GAFD an important part of Google’s business model?  Obviously not as important as trying to sell us things we don’t want, but certainly strategic against Microsoft.

What gives?

That is as much of a pre-announcement as I can make . . . vague and conditional as it is.

It runs Monday, May 18th through Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I’m a bit overbooked this week.  The song remains the same.  I’ll be there as much as I can and at the dinner Monday night at the Tied House.

If you want to meet up, contact me at robert at rwandering dot net or use the form at =rwandering.

Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR.  According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).

Google:  when are you going to put the effort into this?  The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.

Rob Chambers: how easy is this really?  You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.

So now, I’m using IE8.  Google Docs with WSR works great there.

I was familiar with SSDS before I knew anything about Red Dog Storage Azure Storage.  When I found out about the latter, my initial concern was that Microsoft would confuse developers by offering two overlapping services. Such overlap isn’t too surprising considering that these two projects came out of competing parts of Microsoft.  At the time, there was a pretty consistent message that SDS would someday support relational operations, but to me that meant they should  hold off on SDS until that day came.

Microsoft often offers multiple technologies to solve specific problems — often this is a result of legacy technologies — in this case it seemed a shame to start off with such overlap.

Because of all this, I am very happy to see this clear differentiation between the Azure and SDS services.  This is a good decision for Microsoft, Microsoft developers, and given the roadmap for SDS, an excellent decision for Microsoft’s enterprise customers.

The old terms are back in effect: delete your account and so goes your data.

A minor success for users everywhere – even those who don’t think this stuff matters.

The change?  Before Facebook relinquished their rights to your data if you deleted your account.  Now they don’t. 

I don’t have a problem with this new policy.  I do have a problem with the new part.

Of course, I’m not arguing whether Facebook can legally make this change, but it does violate their user contract.  I’m not talking about a legal TOS, but of an understanding with their users.  What is the problem?

• Facebook has just asserted ownership to something that they didn’t claim ownership to before.  And this isn’t future data, this is past data.  Data you already contributed to Facebook with an understanding that they wouldn’t keep it.

This is another example of what I call the user-beware contract – where the TOS can change at any time without notification. 

So, what is the user-aware way to make such a change?

• Maintain their old policy for data in Facebook before the change.  This bifurcates user data between before and after the policy. Delete your account?  Old data goes away, new data does not.

OK, but this is still a user-beware contract.  What else should they do?

• Require users to opt-in to the new policy.  If they opt out, either delete them or let them continue the old policy.

I’m sure Facebookians (and any one hosting a large service) is rolling their eyes at this point.  But just because being user-aware is inconvenient doesn’t make it infeasible.

And a shout out to Ned Sykes for prompting this post: no, I’m not concerned about Facebook stealing my tweets, but as a voice in user rights, I am interested in promoting TOS that are pro user.

BTW: The user-beware/user-aware terms are defined in my post User Contracts – Part II: User Beware.

Well… this is embarrassing. We just released an update that’s newer than 14.0.8050.1202. One of the two bugs it fixes, is that our “Check for updates” mechanism broke irrevocably in 14.0.8050.1202 and earlier builds.

If you download the new version from http://download.live.com then “Check for updates” will work again. Sorry for the inconvenience!

So, if you aren’t at least at version 14.0.8064.206, then you should upgrade again.

It looks better and now it renders my blog template correctly.  Maybe there are more features I’m missing.

It is worth upgrading it just to get the “Check for updates” feature.  So you never again have to figure out how to upgrade it (see Jim’s rant here: Sighcrosoft – Why Can’t I Just Love Live Writer Without Confusion?).

Strangely enough, its now easy to upgrade here:  http://download.live.com/writer.

Although I really like OpenID, I am critical of it.  Why?  Because trust is not baked-in. 

This makes it hard for a Relying Party (RP) to determine if an OpenID comes from a trustworthy Identity Provider (IP).  I believe this is the fundamental roadblock to the big services becoming RPs.  My eyes roll to the back of my head whenever I hear users criticize services for not accepting arbitrary OpenIDs. (More here: OpenID and the Relying Party Patchwork).

This roadblock is a problem for the OpenID technologists to solve. 

The confused users is another problem altogether.  While I am a bit skeptical of the motives behind demanding OpenID adoption without solving this trust problem first, OpenID does have a real problem with an inaccurate market perception. 

So, I decided to vote.  There are 17 nominees and each member gets 7 votes.  I have not decided who I will vote for, but my votes will go to those who see these as top priorities of the foundation.  I am mainly basing my votes on the candidate statements (https://openid.net/foundation/members/elections/1 for members).  If you aren’t a member, you can see the complete list of nominees at ReadWriteWeb. 

Tentatively, here are my yes votes . . .

• Nat Sakimura:  He lists Trust relationship and reputation as barriers to adoption.
• David Recordon:  Unfortunately, aside from his obvious credentials he doesn’t say what he thinks are important for the foundation.  He has probably written this elsewhere — I’ll have move past his statement.
• Same for Joseph Smarr and Scott Kveton
• Johannes Ernst: He talks about “mainstream sites” and relying parties, not just users.
• Chris Messina:  I respect his work and certainly like what he says about usability — he doesn’t mention relying parties though.

What am I missing (besides a 7th vote)?  Am I wrong about the priorities?  Should my votes go elsewhere? 

And I’m happy to say that the OpenID plugin finally works for me.  I don’t know why it started working, but I’m not complaining.

Of course, now begins the discussion of how all these pieces fit together.  

This is not a simple approach like Amazon’s EC2 or Google App Engine.  Not to trivialize either, but they are certainly easier to understand.  Try explaining them to the proverbial grandmother — no problem, especially if you leave out virtualization and pythons   (preemptive comment: I know AWS is much more than EC2 and that bigger and better things are coming from Google).

Regardless, the Microsoft Azure is multi-faceted.  In typical Microsoft fashion, there is a lot for a developer to choose from:

• Azure Storage, Management, and Compute.  Run WCF/ASP.NET based services, with work queues and data storage.
• Microsoft .NET Services, nee biztalk.net (wrote about here).  This gives you an Internet Service Bus, Access Control, and Workflow Services.  Messages and workflow in the cloud connecting other cloud and enterprise offerings.  Very big deal.
• Microsoft SQL Services, nee SQL Server Data Services or SSDS.  Eventually a relational model in the sky, currently not too different from Azure Storage.
• Live Services: Not too much detail on this today, but this is clearly what was “Live Mesh”: a rich synchronization framework, “live operating environment” for writing applications to across the Web and on user’s devices. 
• Windows Live (Live Office, Live Sharepoint, Live Dynamics CRM, etc). In-cloud applications extensible by partners and users with in-cloud and in-premises solutions.

It all does fit together, and will be of immediate value to developers.  As Marc Jacobs of Lab49 said to me afterward,

We could make use of all of these services today.

Damned straight.  It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner. 

This last point is an important one.  Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud.  While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit. 

Taking this all together — not forgetting Microsoft’s leading developer productivity story — it looks like a home run to me.

Google releases a new browser.  The world declares “browser war” with some apprehension and  relish.  Web developers are cringing because browser compatibility is a major source of effort, cost, and frustration for software developers.

Q. Why would Google do this to us?  Just to take away Microsoft browser share? 

A. No.

Q. Are they doing this to extend the “Google OS” to the desktop in a way they control?

A. Probably, but that isn’t even their first concern.

Q. So, what is going on?

A. Well, I’m glad you asked.

Google is working to make their JavaScript-view of the Web as powerful as possible.  This makes sense given their enormous investments in JavaScript and in their own application suite.

Contrary to the approaches of Microsoft and Adobe with their Rich Internet Applications (RIA) frameworks, Google has focused on JavaScript. Where Microsoft and Adobe are building a better user experience inside of a container, Google is creating a better user experience through dynamic HTML and AJAX techniques.

Their developer model includes building out tooling to make it easier to author AJAX applications.  This includes the efforts made in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to enable modern IDE tooling for AJAX development. This allows developers to build maintainable object-oriented applications (in Java) that get converted and optimized to JavaScript.  Plus it promises cross-browser compatibility.

On the client side, they have Google Gears to enable local storage, improved caching support, and offline mode.

Q. So what have they been missing?  A browser? 

A. Not exactly.  They’ve been missing a JavaScript client runtime engine.

Google has made great advances in AJAX application development and tooling, but they have had to rely on others to provide reliability, responsiveness, performance, etc.

And that is what Chrome is about: taking control of the runtime engine for Google applications.  This makes the Google applications way more compelling.  More specifically, Chrome is about delivering that engine.  As Google says, they would love it if other browsers adopt the engine too.  I buy that.

Of course, by that time Chrome will be differentiated from its JavaScript engine.  By then Chrome will be about the Google OS.

Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

These feature changes are actually pretty big.  Revision tracking?  Support for Google Gears?  Full support of SSL (finally)?  Theme previews?  Really cool “Press This” button?  Big.

This feels to me like a major release.  Probably not as major as the 2.5 release, but still pretty major.

In my book, 2.5 should have been version 3.0 and this one should have been 3.5.

Does the version number matter?  Yeah, it does.  It isn’t just about marketing.  It signals something about the maturity of the product.

Disclaimer: I am not immune to such version number mistakes.  After all, the Digipede Network 2.1 should have been version 2.5.

Note that I refer to cloud services, not to the cloud.  I am not interested in defining cloud as a term, because I don’t think it very useful.  For those of us in the distributed computing space, cloud is the latest buzzword to compete with the word grid in terms of utter ambiguity.  I think the ship has already sailed on this one and I’m not going to try to call it back.

So, everyone is talking about cloud services and much of the conversation centers on understanding them and how they are changing the landscape.  Of course, cloud services are not one thing.  I find it helpful to think about them as parts of a continuum.  This seems useful regardless of the technical level of the people with whom I’m speaking.

The diagram to the right shows this continuum from infrastructure to platform to software.   Brief definitions of these parts are:

• Infrastructure includes provisioning of hardware or virtual computers on which one generally has control over the OS; therefore allowing the execution of arbitrary software.
• Platform indicates a higher-level environment for which developers write custom applications.  Generally the developer is accepting some restrictions on the type of software they can write in exchange for built-in application scalability. 
• Software (as a Service) indicates special-purpose software made available through the Internet.

I have indicated several companies that play at different parts of this stack.  This list is not comprehensive nor does it attempt to represent motion across the stack.

One scenario in which I find myself talking about the continuum is when people equate Amazon EC2 with Google App Engine.  EC2 is a flexible / scalable virtual hosting platform with provisioning APIs.  It allows you to dynamically scale the number of instances of your OS (i.e., Linux).  What you do with those instances is up to you.  Google App Engine operates at a much higher level in the stack.  It is a new software platform with specific APIs.  It requires developers to build for this specific platform.  yes, they are both in the cloud, but they are very different services. 

Another scenario in which the continuum is useful is in thinking about what vendors and new entrants might be up to.  The continuum makes one thing even more clear: many vendors that operate higher in the stack are relying on their own internal lower-level infrastructure or platform.  This begs some questions: which vendors will expose lower-level interfaces?  And of course, which vendors will move up the stack? 

• SalesForce is already moving down with their PaaS offering. 
• Any chance Google will expose its infrastructure stack?  I doubt it, but I do expect them to move down a little. 
• Some of the readers of this blog probably know better than I where Amazon and Microsoft are planning to go.

Yet another way it is useful is in comparing vendors inside of a particular category.  Maybe I’ll write more on that later.

Is the continuum obvious?  Using the definition of obvious from patent law, yes, but I think it a useful paradigm.

1. Sharing one credential across all of your Internet services is not a good idea.  See How many OpenIDs do I need?
2. The OpenID vision isn’t ready because there is not yet an ecosystem for Internet services (i.e., Relying Parties) to rate the trust level of an arbitrary Identity Provider.  See OpenID isn’t ready for prime time.

This led to a conversation with Bill Washburn, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation. He was a pleasure to talk to and receptive to my ideas and concerns.  I left that conversation with an interest in contributing to OpenID through my writing.  I have been pretty pegged lately on other activities, but found the Microsoft HealthVault announcement interesting because it is at the intersection of these two topics. 

What is the announcement?  That Microsoft’s HealthVault will become an OpenID Relying Party later this week. 

Very cool news.  Congratulations to Microsoft for becoming the first big player to be an OpenID Relying Party in a significant way.  Also, congratulations to the OpenID Foundation and Bill Washburn for their role in this.

Now how is this intersection of these two topics?

1. Sharing Credentials

I’ll start by partially answering my first question:

How many OpenIDs do I need?

Partial answer:

I need one for each health information provider; for exclusive use with that provider.

I just don’t want to share these with any other Internet service. 

So the premise that OpenID allows me to share credentials across sites is of no value to me here.  (Note: that said, there are good reasons I might choose other Identity Providers for this application).

2. How do Relying Parties know who to Trust?

There are a growing number of providers out there, new implementations of custom coded OpenID providers, established businesses, startups, etc.

So if you want to become a Relying Party, who do you trust?  Everyone?  No.  The answer is easy.  From Sean Nolan,

The deal is — as of our next release in the next few days, users will have a new way to identify themselves to HealthVault. In addition to Windows Live ID, they will be given the option of using OpenID accounts from Verisign or TrustBearer.

You, the Relying Party, choose an explicit list of trusted Providers.  This is a completely rational approach.  Especially if you are responsible for protecting confidential data. 

Before you know it, more and more companies/services will become Relying Parties.  Each service — at least those that protect valuable confidential data — will have to perform a risk analysis to determine which Providers to accept.  Each Relying Party will end up with a different set of accepted Providers — a different set in constant flux.

Earlier I suggested that I could choose how to consolidate my OpenIDs, but the reality may be much different where I have to choose OpenID providers based on the services I use.  This reality seems like a complicated, user-hostile patchwork of Identity.  Kind of like what we had before OpenID.  Only more complicated.

What do I think should be done about it? 

One answer is that the OpenID Foundation fast-track efforts to formalize trust and reputation resources for Relying Parties. Bill Washburn had some other ideas too, and maybe this Microsoft announcement is in support of that effort.

How long will any of this take?  Can’t say, but I will continue to look on with interest and write about OpenID.  Despite my criticism, I am a fan.

Here are my notes:

Best things I saw were (in order):

1. Android.  Very disruptive.  It will force the iPhone to be more open.  It will further commoditize the hardware (driving down prices).  It places Symbian, RIM, and WM into filling niche roles.  Of course the other mobile OSes aren’t sitting still, but they are already playing catch up.  This will put them further behind.
2. GWT.  JavaScript apps written in Java with familiar tools.  Cool.  Interesting how Microsoft and Adobe are solving the JavaScript-dev-maint problem with rich containers (Silverlight and Air / Flash) while Google is solving it with a Java to JavaScript compiler.  The former are working outside
3. OpenSocial.  The fundamentals of this API and Friend Connect are to allow social applications to interact across silos.  To me this means user control.  This will ultimately force silos (like Facebook) to open up.  I like it.

Participated in the ongoing argument between Robert Scoble and Steve Gillmor regarding FriendFeed.

Met a man dressed in a pirate costume.  Or Ben Franklin costume.  Pano Kroko.  Fascinating guy.  Checkout www.churmo.com.

Ran into an old friend, Julian Wixson.  Hadn’t seen him for at least ten years.

Went on a trek with Robert, Steve, Pano, Julian, Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear, Mark Lucovsky  and a student to see Gary Vaynerchuk talk about his new book.  I learned two things:

1. It is about a 15 minute walk from Moscone West to Union Square. 
2. Don’t drink the same varietal twice.

Got back to the Google party just in time to see Flight of the Conchords.  Those guys are very funny.

I just read it.  It had me laughing so hard I couldn’t read through the tears in my eyes.  It’s all classic Gillmor, but when you get about two thirds down, LOL:

Here’s my demo of the difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:

Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

Ten minutes later….

FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

And it just gets funnier.

BTW: I misheard Steve on the phone and thought his post was called Blaine FriendFeed, a reference to Blaine Cook.  Now that’s funny.