Microsoft News Tracker

On Friday he was congratulating the Vista team on the release of RC1, but today Brian Valentine is Amazon-bound:

Brian Valentine, the Microsoft senior vice president in charge of Windows development, is leaving to join Amazon.com, a company representative said in an e-mailed statement this afternoon. It’s a major departure, but it might not qualify as the biggest surprise: Microsoft had said in August that it planned to reassign Valentine to another area of the company after Windows Vista was released. Senior Vice President Jon DeVaan was brought in at the time to ultimately assume Valentine’s role.

We mentioned that rearrangement here. Valentine will start at Amazon in mid-September.

Update: More at the Seattle Times.

Yesterday started off with a Microsoft leak of Canadian prices for Vista and late in the day, Joe Wilcox spotted that Amazon had goofed and posted US retail prices. He observes that they are mostly comparable to XP (except for Vista Ultimate), but are excessively complicated. Robert McLaws puts it all in a nice table (below) and notes that the availability date is January 30, 2007. McLaws also reiterates his suggestion for cheaper additional licenses and separately explains how easy it would be for Microsoft to do.

My take is that only diehard geeks are going to be doing upgrades from XP or even buying retail copies of Vista. Everyone else will get it with their next PC and may end up getting the premium versions with the Anytime Upgrade so what really matters in the consumer space are the OEM prices and the Anytime Upgrade prices. For large businesses of course, the volume purchase prices are what are important. If we wildly assume that all these unknown Vista prices will bear the same relationship to XP prices as the retail prices do, then it doesn’t look like much of a change except for those that feel they need all the features in the Vista Ultimate edition.

Update: Thanks to Ed Bott for pointing out an error concerning Media Center features in the original version of this post which has been corrected above. Some months ago he created a Windows Vista Secret Decoder Ring which is very useful for figuring out the features of the different Vista versions.

Also, Amazon says that listing the prices was no mistake:

Amazon.com spokesman Sean Sundwell said the Seattle-based online retailer posted the listings and began taking pre-orders two or three weeks ago because consumers were asking for that option. He said the prices are from the latest price sheet that Microsoft provided.

“The one thing we were certain on is the price,” Sundwell said.

But Sundwell said Amazon.com can’t be certain when Vista will be released. The retailer lists the ship date as Jan. 30, which Sundwell said was an estimate based on Microsoft’s public assertions that it plans to release the consumer version of Windows in January.

The arcane science of IT operations never really went away, of course, but the transition from raised floor glass house to client-server to Internet seemed to make it less visible and deemphasized physical plant in favor of the management of numerous servers. Now, however, the advent of online Web services with the vast server farms required has brought operations back to prominence again, but with a completely different slant. Tim O’Reilly:

I spoke last week with Debra Chrapaty, the VP of Operations for Windows Live, to explore one of the big ideas I have about Web 2.0, namely that once we move to software as a service, everything we thought we knew about competitive advantage has to be rethought. Operations becomes the elephant in the room. Debra agrees. She’s absolutely convinced that what she does is one of the big differentiators for Microsoft going forward.
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People talk about “cloud storage” but Debra points out that that means servers somewhere, hundreds of thousands of them, with good access to power, cooling, and bandwidth. She describes how her “strategic locations group” has a “heatmap” rating locations by their access to all these key limiting factors, and how they are locking up key locations and favorable power and bandwidth deals. And as in other areas of real estate, getting the good locations first can matter a lot. She points out, for example, that her cost of power at her Quincy, WA data center, soon to go online, is 1.9 cents per kwh, versus about 8 cents in CA. And she says, “I’ve learned that when you multiply a small number by a big number, the small number turns into a big number.” Once Web 2.0 becomes the norm, the current demands are only a small foretaste of what’s to come. For that matter, even server procurement is “not pretty” and there will be economies of scale that accrue to the big players.

Blaine Harden at the Washington Post had more last Sunday on the odd history of low cost power in Quincy, WA and on the subject of server provisioning, see what David Carr and the CIO Tech Informer have to say how about how Google builds its custom server infrastructure.

Of course, there’s more to it than just bricks, mortar, megawatts, servers, and other gear. The applications have to be deployed and managed over thousands of machines at multiple data centers, and most of all, they have to actually work in such an environment. Dare Obasanjo:

I remember talking to a coworker about all the changes we were making so that MSN Spaces could be deployed in multiple data centers and he asked why we didn’t get this for free from “the platform”. I jokingly responded “It isn’t like the .NET Framework has a RouteThisUserToTheRightDataCenterBasedOnTheirGeographicalLocation() API does it?”.

The subtext here is that only a few of the big players like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are ever going to fully develop these competencies and of the players, only Microsoft completely develops its own platform. Back to O’Reilly who kicks the following argument back and forth:

Internet-scale applications are pushing the envelope on operational competence, but enterprise-class applications will follow. And here, Microsoft has a key advantage over open source, because the Windows Live team and the Windows Server and tools team work far more closely together than open source projects work with companies like Yahoo!, Amazon, or Google.

Regardless of who has the advantage, it’s clear that there’s a divide building and the question is how much of today’s enterprise and personal computing gets pushed across into the new world of hosted online services. Nicholas Carr refers to it as the Utility Age of IT which would be better if the term “utility” hadn’t been so abused during the dotcom boom, but what else would you call the few big players who own the massive, geographically dispersed datacenters? And as long as you are calling them “utilities,” what do you say when someone gets the idea to regulate them like a conventional utility? That may seem far-fetched, but if the computing assets and resources of a very large number of users no longer exist in their desktops, but in ubiquitous online services hosted in a huge building in Quincy, Washington you can bet that the politicians will want to get in on the action.

And it’s not just building big buildings in rural areas as Om Malik describes in Silicon Valley’s next payday:

Three years ago, Force 10 networks faced a bleak future. Telecoms, the major customers for its high-speed data switches, were collapsing. Then Google ordered a batch of switches for a major expansion of its data centers - and has been buying ever since. “It put the company on the path to the big time,” says Gary Morgenthaler, general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, an investor in Force 10. The startup is reported to have hit $60 million in revenue in 2005 and is expected to file for an IPO soon.

Force 10 was at the front edge of a wave of hardware spending that is about to reach tsunami proportions, creating huge opportunities for established and fledgling gearmakers alike. The Big Five Web titans - Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Yahoo, and especially Microsoft - are locked in a frenzied battle to improve their ability to deliver content, whether for Flickr photo albums or eBay’s fast-growing listings. To do it they need tons of nuts-and-bolts hardware - storage, servers, routers, switches, load balancers - which they’re consuming at an incredible speed.
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For example, Microsoft plans to switch all 230 million users of its Hotmail service over to Windows Live Mail accounts with 2 gigabytes of free storage each, matching the amount of free storage Google offers its Gmail customers. That adds up to a whopping 460 petabytes that Microsoft will have to provide, not to mention all the routers and switches needed to shunt the data around. Industry sources say Microsoft is also seeking 10,000 servers for its online gaming service, Xbox Live.

Such virtual land grabs mean a major payday for Silicon Valley. Most hardware companies don’t want to talk about it, worried that rivals might undercut their bids. But the beneficiaries of the $1.4 billion that Google is projected to splash out on infrastructure in 2006 include disc drive manufacturers Seagate and Hitachi. Network Appliance and Cisco are among Yahoo’s major suppliers, while Sun Microsystems boasts about being eBay’s server vendor. Juniper has won a Microsoft contract for its routers estimated by some insiders at $120 million.

More details by following the link, but folks with long memories will remember that Sun was riding high powering the dotcom boom in the late 90’s and then suffered mightily during the bust. I suspect the difference here is that these are major companies buying the goods and while things will slow down after the intial buildout, augmenting and replacing will be a tidy business for years to come. And a considerable expense for Microsoft and the other big players.