Structure 08

I attended the Structure 2008 conference in San Francisco this week, thanks to Anand for arranging passes for the same. The talks at structure08 were not very technical, focused primarily on some business, ethical considerations and adoption of cloud computing.

Nick Carr:

• drew a symbolic link between Bill Gates retiring and Structure08 (first cloud computing conference) being in the same week. Marked the shift of computing from desktop to the cloud.

• while building infrastructure, think of the ethical dimension. With electricty there was no requirement, with cloud computing, there is information involved.

Jonathan Yarmis:

• claimed that a single converged device would never exist and cloud computing enables independence of location/device
• The enterprise itself hasn’t figured out how to embrace cloud computing; users are figuring it out very quickly.

Werner Vogels, Amazon:

• claimed that a typical company spends 70% effort on scaling/undifferentiated heavy lifting. AWS enables companies to focus on core value.
• Cloud computing makes CAPEX an OPEX (Operating expense, variable cost model
• Amazon calls 100s of services to construct a single page on amazon.com

Mendel Rosenblum, VMWare:

• Run VM in my house or run it outside on the cloud, and have an easy way to move it around.
• Desktop on cloud

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun:

• Drew an analogy between storing your money and storing data. People are more comfortable storing money in the bank, similarly they would be more comfortable storing data securely in the cloud.

Various panels:

• Meebo – They use cloud computing (AWS) for things like file upload that are non-core to business, prefer to keep control for core applications.
• Facebook – Leverage our community to translate our site in various languages
• Q: How to handle PR around outages? A: Be transparent, communicate and set realistic timelines for when service will be restored.
• Concerns raised about vendor lockin with cloud computing platform providers. Need for open APIs for cloud computing.

Other notables/observations -

• VMWare and Sun seem to be positioned for cloud computing in the enterprise space. They are being bypassed though by the AWS and GAE (Google App Engine) who are using commodity servers/software.
• Talk around everything as a service (software, storage, content, applications, data, platform etc.)
• AWS is leading the cloud computing space. Google (GAE) and Microsoft were at a distant 2nd.
• Yahoo did not have much presence at Structure08. That was a bit of a surprise considering their contribution to Hadoop.
• Hallway conversations – ‘cloud computing = grid computing + billing’
• Early stage startups seemed to use cloud computing more than established players. Established players were more concerned more about control, were willing to experiment with cloud computing when they need extra capacity, but would like to maintain their own infrastructure for bread and butter type stuff.
• Hallway conversations about how Oracle viewed BigTable/Hypertable – they seem to be following the trend but don’t have any products in the space. Talk about how the Oracle’s enterprise customers did not care about the BigTable model (need a relational database etc.).

Yahoo: Open up your search index to gain market share

Yahoo has been going through some turbulent weather. The Microsoft/Yahoo merger talks has fizzled out with Yahoo trying to fiercely stay independent. Yahoo has signed up a multi-year search ads monetizing deal with Google. Techcrunch is reporting a lot of executives leaving. It seems as if Yahoo has given up on Search monetization. If they give up on Search monetization, how long would they stay in the Search relevance, quality and related applications itself? On the other hand, unless Yahoo improves adoption of it’s Search products, it will not gain traction on Search monetization (catch-22).

Yahoo’s vision was to be the starting point for the consumer on the web with various Yahoo portals and Yahoo’s directory. Consumers though have moved to search as their starting point on the web and the default search for most consumers is Google. Yahoo’s strategy for being the starting point on the web would not work unless it stays in the search game.

How can Yahoo stay competitive and win the search and search monetization game?

I think Yahoo should open up completely. Open source is a great way to win the game without playing second fiddle. This has worked in the past for Linux when competing with Microsoft Windows. Google tried the same thing with OpenSocial while competing with Facebook. Google is fiercely secretive about Search where it is a market leader but has embraced open source (with Android) when competing with iPhone, RIMM and other mobile phone platforms. Playing the ‘open’ card helps the smaller rival get significant market share against the dominant players.

While Yahoo is flirting with openness through programs such as Hadoop, Search API, YUI and SearchMonkey they need to embrace open source completely at their core if they want to win at Search against Google.

Yahoo should open up their crawl & index and let developers run computations and build applications on Yahoo’s crawl and index. Yahoo and has a large crawl corpus representative of the web, opening it up would enable development of a lot of other search and web mining applications on top of it. Developers could build new signals or vertical search engines on top of Yahoo’s index. Yahoo would benefit from development of new signals which could get incorporated in their own search applications. New search applications could integrate better with Yahoo properties.

Harnessing the developer community would get the technology early adopters to start using Yahoo Search, who in turn could influence the main stream users. Yahoo could build a platform and an ecosystem where developers and startups who want to build interesting applications/technology could build it on top of Yahoo. Yahoo could provide the platform, distribution (Yahoo gets huge amount of page views) and help them with monetization. The next gen web applications like vertical search engines, semantic web applications etc. would be built on top of Yahoo’s search platform. Think of it as Facebook opening up it’s platform to allow building of social applications, Yahoo could do the same for Search and Search related applications. Let the good folks who are building applications like Indeed, Spock, Simply Hired, Trulia and similar web applications, build it on top of Yahoo’s Search platform. I for one would have definitely built Sangeetix on Yahoo’s platform.

I & Hobbes

I have named this blog after my favorite comic strip – Calvin and Hobbes, hence the name ihobbes.

Who is Hobbes? (according to Wikipedia)

Hobbes is Calvin’s stuffed tiger. From everyone else’s point of view, they see Hobbes as Calvin’s stuffed tiger. From Calvin’s point of view, however, Hobbes is an anthropomorphic tiger, much larger than Calvin and full of independent attitudes and ideas.

This blog to me is Hobbes.