Gary Edwards's List: Cloud Computing

" These apps want to replace email altogether

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Here's how Slack looks like on mobile.
Slack: One of the fastest growing enterprise apps ever, Slack is a work collaboration app that allows users to communicate and share files in one big chat room. It recently raised $120 million at a $1.1 billion valuation.

Cisco’s Project Squared: Cisco revealed a new app called Project Squared on Monday. It basically does everything Slack does, only with video and audio features. Users can communicate through the chat box, and even start a video conference right within it.

Quip: Founded by Bret Taylor, Facebook's former chief technology officer, Quip is a work collaboration app that lets users to create documents and spreadsheets and communicate right within them. Users can edit and leave notes on the same file simultaneously, reducing the need to send email attachments.

Evernote’s Work Chat: Evernote released a new feature called “Work Chat” last month, which allows users to share files without having to leave the Evernote app. It creates a chat box within the app, so users can talk to each other and share files, ultimately killing the need to send any email attachments.

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"Primary Data's co-founder and CTO is David Flynn, who was CEO of Fusion-io until May 2013. Its CEO is Lance Smith, another former Fusion-io executive. Their former company was acquired by SanDisk earlier this year for $1.1 billion. Wozniak took the stage with Primary Data on Wednesday at the Demo conference in San Jose as the company debuted."

"It's estimated that 108 billion work emails are sent each day with employees checking their inbox 36 times an hour, something IBM hopes to cut down on with Verse.

The software, which is available in beta today, will be rolled out in the first quarter of 2015 as a freemium version available on both desktop as well as an app on iOS and Android. IBM seeks to take a larger share of the $4.7 billion market for enterprise email, as forecast by IDC. IBM, which already has Lotus Notes, is one of the main players in this space, one that has traditionally been dominated by Microsoft's Outlook. Google has attempted to make inroads with Gmail for business, offering its office suite for the enterprise.

"The convergence of analytics, cloud, social and mobile technologies is not just impacting our personal lives, it's profoundly changing how we work," said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, IBM Information and Analytics Group in a press release.  "These forces are reshaping how people make decisions, create and share new ideas and collaborate across teams to get work done. With IBM Verse, we challenged our design teams to use analytics to completely reimagine the social collaboration experience to focus on engaging people and driving outcomes, not managing messages and inboxes."

IBM hopes that in addition to using its cloud, analytics and social data, it hopes to attract new clients by using Watson into the environment, the company's cognitive computing platform. Users can ask Watson a question on any particular topic and then get a direct replay with a number of answers, ranked by degree of confidence. In September, IBM announced Watson Analytics, which allows users to gain access to Watson's predictive and analytics tools wherever they are."

"IBM Navigator on Cloud can:
Enable mobile and web content collaboration, including rich document preview capabilities that allow users to efficiently compare and identify documents and versions.
Help users search and act on content more easily and with greater security in a managed and auditable environment.
Ease of use that leverages the ECM experience platform based on IBM Content Navigator.
Deliver customized content solutions with a flexible cloud model that accelerates time to market.
Take advantage of a powerful IBM ECM and cloud foundation that includes IBM SoftLayer, IBM Content Navigator and IBM ECM technology."

"Microsoft today released a free version of Office for iPhone users, and seriously beefed up the iPad version. Best of all, you can now use it to edit documents without a subscription to Microsoft's cloud version of Office, Office 365.

But, like all freebie software, Microsoft still hopes to entice you to open up your wallets and pay for a premium subscription, particularly if you are a business user.

So here's a partial list of features that are only available for those who pay. We should note, while nothing beats a price of "free," the Office 365 subscription does offer a lot of features for your money — besides the ones listed below, such as free storage, and full offline copies of the software that you can load on multiple devices.

Here are some features that iPhone/iPad users ONLY get if they buy the software:

Orientation: the ability to flip from portrait to landscape.

Columns in Word: You can't add them to your document, though you can view them and work with them in a document sent to you.

Limits in the Track Changes feature: The Track Changes feature is a biggie for a lot of users: it keeps track of who edited what. Free users can't fully use this feature, though they'll be able to see tracked changes in a document sent to them.

No Text Styles, Word Art: Basic text editing changes are available in the free app, like changing the size of font. But special features, like Word Art, are not.

Ditto for Advanced editing of charts: Altering data labels or legends is not included in the free versions, though you can see this info in a document sent to you.

Changing cell colors in Excel: You can see colors, but you can't add them — that includes shading.

Advanced editing of pictures: You can see a picture in its full glory in a document sent to you, but will be somewhat limited if you want to draw or edit a picture. 

Business document editing: With the free Office, you can use Microsoft's consumer cloud storage OneDrive or, soon, Dropbox. But the free app will use your business account's cloud storage, whether it's OneDrive for Business, Dropbox for Business, or SharePoint. It will let you look at documents sent to you from someone else's business account, but not edit them."

"The price of cloud storage has been declining rapidly over the past few years, and this trend has raised serious questions about the long-term viability of cloud storage companies like Dropbox and Box. Both Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT  ) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG  ) (NASDAQ: GOOGL  ) offer competing cloud storage products, and aggressive price cuts from these two companies have forced smaller competitors to rethink their business models.

Microsoft dealt another serious blow to Dropbox and Box last week, announcing that all of its Office 365 subscriptions will come with an unlimited amount of cloud storage through its OneDrive service. This severely undercuts the competition, and it seems unlikely that either Box, which is hemorrhaging cash according to its IPO filing, or Dropbox, which has yet to file for an IPO but is very likely losing money as well, will ever be profitable.

The big problem facing Box and Dropbox
Both Dropbox, which until recently targeted mainly the consumer cloud storage market, and Box, which has been focusing on the enterprise for quite some time, have amassed a tremendous number of users. Dropbox reached 300 million users earlier this year, and at the time of Box's IPO filing in March, the company claimed 25 million users and 34,000 paying organizations.

Most of these users don't pay either company a dime, however, instead taking advantage of the free tier of service. Both Dropbox and Box rely on a fraction of these users eventually paying for a plan with greater storage and more features, but Microsoft's aggressive move to bundle unlimited cloud storage with Office 365, as well as Google's bundling of cloud storage with its productivity apps, throws a wrench in this business model.

In short, there's not much of a value proposition for either Box or Dropbox:"

"Microsoft is releasing new, beefed-up versions of its popular Office software apps for iPhones and iPads, part of the company's push to stay relevant to workers in an increasingly mobile world.

It's also working on new versions for Android tablets and phones, although they're not yet ready for general release.

As more workers use smartphones and tablets along with — or instead of — desktop PCs, they want to have the same capabilities on all their devices, says Michael Atella, director of Microsoft's Office apps product management. Microsoft has been working for the last two years to build new web-based versions of its software and apps that can be easily used on the much smaller screens of mobile devices, but still seem familiar to people who use the traditional desktop tools.

The free updates, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, replace a limited iPhone version and upgrade a more powerful set of apps that the company released for iPad tablets in March, which has been downloaded 40 million times. The older iPhone version allowed users to view files and make simple editing changes, but the new apps will resemble the iPad versions and have more of the capabilities found in Office software used on desktop computers. And unlike earlier iPad versions, the new apps don't require a subscription to create new files or documents. While the apps are free, Microsoft hopes to make money by selling premium features, including security tools for business users, through its Office 365 subscription service."

excellent advice:
'Hey Mike, I know we don't know each other, but I think we have some mutual interests (or connections) and I would value you in my network,"

"The suite of applications that includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, first released in 1990, generated nearly a third of Microsoft’s revenue during its last fiscal year — about $26 billion of $87 billion in total. By some estimates, the software accounted for an even higher portion of the company’s gross profits.

But in a sign of the seismic changes underway in the tech industry, Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, said on Thursday that it would give away a comprehensive mobile edition of Office. The free software for iPads, iPhones and Android tablets will do most of the most essential things people normally do with the computer versions of the product.

Continue reading the main story
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Just a few years ago, giving away a full free version of Office would have earned a Microsoft chief executive a visit from a witch doctor. Now, the move is following through on the rallying cry coming from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new chief executive, who has pushed cloud and mobile computing as lodestars for the company’s future."

Does Google have a response to Office 365 - OneDrive - Azure juggernaut?

During the announcement of the Microsoft - Dropbox agreement, Drew Houston stated that Dropbox had over 35 Billion native (Office) documents stored. That's 35 Billion reasons to use Office 365 instead of Google Docs.

Google Docs is no doubt an extraordinary suite of collaborative mobile and cloud ready editors. But they do not provide any thing close to the kind of support for native documents that Office 365 provides.

Office 365 was designed to be compatible with the One Billion Office desktops that make up the Microsoft monopoly base. That base also includes 98% of legacy business systems, and those business systems are fueled by native documents.

Native documents are the cornerstone of legacy business systems, and cannot be ignored.

Google's problem is that they use conversion to view and edit native documents. That's okay if the collaboration comes at the END of a workflow or business process. But its a killer if comes at any other point in the "process".

Its a well known fact that conversion breaks a native document in terms of both layout and round-trip fidelity. And if you break round-trip fidelity, you also break the business process and workflow these documents fuel. Work stops.

Do you see the problem here? This is not rocket science. And there are two very prominent pilot studies exactly proving my point: The 2005 Massachusetts pilot study, and, the City of Munich effort.

Both pilots ended up throwing in the towel, conceding that Office and the billions of native documents in legacy workflows had a lock on their business systems.

Dropbox understood the these conversion issues, but didn't have any other solution but to cut a deal with Microsoft. Maybe they will buy themselves some time, and try to develop interoperable mobile editors?

Box is in the same position. But other Cloud Productivity platform competitors like Apple, Google and Amazon, have yet to respond to Microsoft Office 365 "integrated productivity platform" juggernaut.

The thing is, dropping prices does not solve the core problem. Not even dropping prices to zero while adding new features will solve this problem.

The only solution that can get Google back into competition with Microsoft, (regarding transitioning business systems to the Cloud), is that of providing pixel-perfect fully collaborative support for native documents; and do so without breaking round-trip fidelity.

The world is waiting. The battle for the 3rd Wave of Computing has begun. Microsoft is dictating the terms of competition for a Cloud Productivity platform.

Where's Google?

~ge~

Oracle Cloud Computing platform

"The two firms, which have been competing in the cloud storage and file sync market -- Dropbox's bread and butter, a feature rather than a business for Microsoft -- will now collaborate, first on tablets and smartphones, then next year online.

Some analysts called it advantage Microsoft in the partnership, but still thought Dropbox got an important win. "What Dropbox gets out of this is survival," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy."

The Bitcasa PAAS Cloud Platform for developers ic called ChallengePost. Document Management is one of the key areas they expect developers to create.

"DeepDyve revolutionizes the way you access research.
Thousands of journals. Millions of articles. Free full-text preview. All for one low monthly price."

"Zero to One is a great read, full of near Biblical insight into how to start and run a business.

In his analysis of why cleantech never quite realized its potential as 'the next big thing' ten or so years ago, Thiel claims that companies neglected "one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer"- and it's a homily well worth repeating:

1. The Engineering Question: Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?

2. The Timing Question: Is now the right time to start your particular business?

3. The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market?

4. The People Question: Do you have the right team?

5. The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?

6. The Durability Question: Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?

7. The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don't see?

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is essential reading for anyone involved in starting up or evaluating a business.

The book is eccentric, entertaining and full of optimistic conceit."

"It’s 2014 and the cloud has been adopted to some degree by nearly 90 percent of all businesses. That is in part because cloud offerings have evolved. Several years ago cloud meant “public cloud.” Today, new hybrid offerings have emerged—combinations of cloud hosting and dedicated hardware—letting businesses tailor their cloud infrastructure to their business demands.

Businesses can choose to manage their cloud infrastructure in-house, or opt for a managed cloud and have their cloud provider shoulder the burden of day-to-day management.

In short, the cloud of the past was a one-size-fits-all offering. Today it is easy for businesses to design a custom solution.
A close look at the landscape of cloud adoption turns up some interesting and surprising statistics:
70 percent of businesses say they have invested money they’ve saved by operating in the cloud back into their businesses.
Businesses report that web hosting is the No. 1 cloud service they use. Email is a close second.
The larger a company grows, the more likely it is that they will host their email in their own data center.
Small companies (under 20 employees) are 20 percent more likely to have adopted the cloud than a company with more than 500 employees."

"Microsoft wants to change how we buy Microsoft Office software. Instead of paying for the software once, Microsoft wants us to be paying for it monthly or annually.

Microsoft offers a variety of subscriptions for the latest version called Office 365.  This isn't cloud software. It still installs on your PC or Mac and the files will also be stored on your PC (though you can set it up to save to the cloud, too).

But the question is: what happens to your files if you decide to stop paying the subscription?

Microsoft does not delete them. It doesn't delete the Office software from your PC either. You can open them and look at them but you can't edit them.

"

"For executives in charge of desktop deployments in a large company, Linux OS was once hailed as a saviour for corporate end users. With incredibly low pricing - free, with fee-based support plans, for example - distributions such as Ubuntu Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise offered a "good enough" user interface, along with plenty of powerful apps and a rich browser.

A few years ago, both Dell and HP jumped on the bandwagon; today, they still offer "developer" and "workstation" models that come pre-loaded with a Linux install. Plus, anyone who follows the Linux market knows that Google has reimagined Linux as a user-friendly tablet interface (the wildly popular Android OS) and a browser-only desktop variant (Chrome OS). Linux also shows up on countless connected home gadgets, fitness trackers, watches and other low-cost devices, mostly because OS costs are so low.

The desktop computing OS for end users has failed to capture any attention lately, though. Al Gillen, the programme vice president for servers and system software at IDC, says the Linux OS as a computing platform for end users is at least comatose - and probably dead. Yes, it has reemerged on Android and other devices, but it has gone almost completely silent as a competitor to Windows for mass deployment. As they say, you can hear the crickets chirping."