Monthly Archive for April, 2008

While I am a Linux girl at heart, I am constantly watching and reading up on Microsoft and it’s direction – for better and worse. By no means am I against Microsoft or any of it’s products and today, I am watching them even closer after reading an article posted on CNET yesterday titled, “Microsoft: Web at the center, not PC“.

Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has the right idea, the right focus, and I’m very curious to know if his ideas and focus are being backed by the rest of the company. Some argue that this is a little too late in the game for them, but hey..at least they’re keeping themselves in the game, right?

He starts by preparing a memo to be sent to the employees -

“Over the past 10 years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the Web is at the center of our experiences–experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.”

Further, Ozzie outlines three principles to guide the company in this new era. Chief among those is the notion that “the Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.” The notion of a Mesh is one that Ozzie has been working on for some time and has culminated in the Live Mesh service that Microsoft detailed on Tuesday. He states that this transformation has been quite the challenge for Microsoft to embrace.

“More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market,” Ozzie said. “Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly ‘software’, not ‘services’, that was top of mind.”

But, he said, “since then, we’ve made tremendous progress in our expansion toward ‘software+services’–from the long-term quests we’ve undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we’ve begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline.”

This memo gives us a look inside of the mind of Ray Ozzie and hopefully it’ll be spread through the company and embraced. This article is definitely worth the read.

It seems swimmers in Zurich, Switzerland will enjoy a nice and warm pool this summer, thanks to a most unusual power source -

Excess heat from an underground data center built inside a former military bunker is being collected and transferred to the nearby pool as part of an innovative energy-efficiency project undertaken by GIB-Services, a Swiss IT collocation company.

The bunker, capable of withstanding a nuclear bomb, was built in 1971 on the outskirts of Zurich to protect the Swiss Army communications team and has been out of use for several years. Accessible through a woodland path in the middle of a forest and built 7 meters (23 feet) underground, the shelter was purchased by GIB three years ago and turned into a data center in a project that was completed in the past few weeks. Because the data center generates so much heat, GIB negotiated with local government officials to pump heat to an indoor facility with several swimming pools, according to IBM, which designed and built the data center for GIB.

“With more efficient building design and up-to-date server technology, energy costs can typically be reduced by 50% when a company builds a new data center or even retrofits an existing one,” says Steve Sams, IBM’s vice president of site and facilities services.

Read the full story here.