Articles about Cloud

It's quite easy for Adobe to throw around statistics about Flash, and you'll frequently hear members of the Adobe team say such things as "Adobe Flash is installed on 99% of PCs," or "75% of all online games are built in Flash," or "80% of all Web video is encoded in Flash." Though these statistics are dubious, there is little doubt about Flash's ubiquity.

But as mobile Web consumption has dramatically increased, mobile Flash technology has been struggling to deliver the full Web experience to resource-constrained devices. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously commented in mid-2008, the full version of Flash was too big, and Flash Lite was too small. What Flash lacked was a product "in the middle" that could fully deliver rich Internet content without also consuming a lot of CPU cycles.

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If the last two months should be interpreted as Microsoft suggests, with Bing's gradual ascent in usage share against Google as a sign of Bing's inevitably catching up, then a similar interpretation of September's numbers from live analytics firm StatCounter should be taken as a sign of Bing's ultimate demise. A sampling of five billion or more US page views from Web sites accessed by StatCounter in September reveals that, of the world's top three search services, Google's usage share has climbed back just above 80%, and is flirting with last November's peak of 81.14% -- meaning Google is back to serving four out of five US-based general queries.

Bing's usage share in the US descended by 1.13% to 8.51% for the month of September, while Yahoo's dove 1.1% to 9.4%. Google's share among the top three has now climbed above where it stood in May (78.72%), when Microsoft changed the name of Windows Live Search.

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By all definitions, Apple's iTunes App Store is a massive success, with sales numbers that would make McDonald's franchisees green with envy. Two billion applications -- half a billion in the last quarter alone -- have been downloaded since the store went live just over 14 months ago. With over 85,000 apps, it puts every mobile platform competitor to shame. The 125,000-strong iPhone Developer Program and successive evolutions of iPhone and iPod touch devices should keep driving growth for a while.

This is all obviously good for Apple, because a vibrant online App Store naturally drives demand for its high-margin hardware. And in the case of the iPhone, AT&T and other partner-carriers benefit from carrying a device whose sales are driven not only by desirable hardware, but by the ability to easily turn the device into pretty much anything the end user wants. The paltry few-thousand choices on Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World, or Palm App Catalog's even paltrier few dozen apps, end up serving as inadvertent advertisements for the iPhone.

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Today, Google is expected to invite as many as 100,000 more participants into the private beta of its concurrent communications system, called Wave. As that happens, many more participants will be able to not only communicate with one another in a more granular form of real-time, but potentially collaborate on work and projects.

It's that latter part of the program that's supposed to congeal at some point into a collective sense of purpose. But this time, unlike Microsoft's first experiments with Dynamic Data Exchange between applications on the same computer three decades ago, there isn't yet a clear, single purpose for the system. No question it could bring individuals as close together as people separated by indefinite distance could become; but as to the question of what they do with one another once they do get together, Google is hoping this question -- like so many others it puts out there in the open -- resolves itself.

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This week, all three of the world's top general search engines touted the addition of deep links to their search results, although Google has been actively experimenting with deep links since this time last year. The basic premise is this: For Web pages that have named anchors above selected subsections -- for example, <A NAME="Details"> -- the search engine is capable of generating subheadings in its search results that link users directly to those subsections, or at least to subsections whose titles imply they may have some bearing upon the query.

The fact that deep links are now official features of Google, Yahoo, and Bing search may not be nearly as relevant today as the fact that all three services made their announcements almost in unison. It's an indication of an actual race going on in the search engine field, reminiscent of the horse-and-buggy days of the early '90s when Lycos and AltaVista were vying against Yahoo for search supremacy. This despite the fact that Yahoo is due to be utilizing search results generated by Microsoft's search engines Real Soon Now.

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YouTube Insight really is an amazing free tool. For users who have uploaded content to Google's popular video sharing site, YouTube Insight provides extremely concise metrics for a video's viewership. It includes maps that show where in the world your video has the most viewers, your audience's demographic makeup, and even a second-by-second audience attention metric.

Today, Google announced that YouTube Insight has been tied into YouTube's Content ID, the management tool that lets broadcasters, studios, labels, and individual copyright holders to identify videos uploaded to YouTube containing their intellectual property.

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Most businesses I know stopped calling the class of documents that Excel produces a "spreadsheet" long ago, and have deferred to the phrase "Excel sheet," rather than to Microsoft's preferred "workbook." The reason is because the types of data the application now works with have ceased to be exclusively flat and bordered. Excel data is complex, often relational, certainly networked.

So already there's going to be a big distinction that limits anything that portends to be the Excel Web App from being the complete Microsoft Excel. You don't want to bring networked, dynamic, data that's interlinked to data elsewhere in the world, onto the public platform; there are too many risks involved. If you have a complex Excel workbook on your home or business system now where the source of your data lies outside the workbook, don't expect to be able to use it on the Excel Web App.

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Download Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 from Fileforum now.

Back in 1990, Microsoft made a genuine attempt to build what is now referred to as an "ecosystem" around applications for Windows, including advising its competitors as to how to write for the system, and even funding smaller groups that needed a leg up to become viable players in the market. As things turned out, however, there ended up being one word processor, one spreadsheet, one presentation manager, and one organizer that each commanded more than 90% of the market, compelling many to wonder aloud why the metaphors comparing Microsoft to something out of a certain old Dutch fairy tale weren't taken more literally.

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Today, Google launched a new project called Sidewiki, which is a browser sidebar that lets users add footnotes to any existing Web page, even if the main site doesn't allow comments. Sidewiki has been added as a feature on Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and the team today said they're working on an edition for Chrome, too.

Sidewiki appears as a field on the left hand side of the browser, where users can post contextual commentary. If it's a site paraphrasing a piece of literature and a user happens to have a link to the full text, it can be added there. While it can very easily suffer from "FIRST!" syndrome or serve as a spam advertisement platform, posts are not anonymous. And as Sundar Pichai, VP of Google Product Management and Michal Cierniak, Engineering Lead for Google Sidewiki today said the content will be ranked by quality.

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You can't fault any service for not being capable of providing 100% uptime; but you also can't help but notice the shockwaves when that one-tenth-of-one-percent comes around. This morning, Google is acknowledging that users throughout yesterday had difficulty accessing its Google News server, although it is not calling the event an outright outage.

News publishers whose promotional models rely upon Google News received notices from Google yesterday afternoon saying that users began having access difficulties at about 12:30 pm PDT (3:30 EDT) yesterday. Betanews is capable of tracking its own readership, along with referral sources, on a minute-to-minute basis; and we could actually see the event as though we were watching a seismometer. Assuming our instrumentation is accurate, our traffic from Google News began plummeting almost three hours earlier than this report, at about 1:00 pm EDT. Referral traffic from Google News began resuming its normal pattern at about 5:30.

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One of the more startling announcements we've received from Microsoft since the first word that Office will support OpenDocument Format as an alternative default, was last week's news that access to its forthcoming Office Live Apps would be open to all users for free. We're being told again and again that there's no catch, no asterisk with small print behind it, that Microsoft is perfectly happy to let everyone edit Office documents online for free.

But does the Technical Preview give any indication that these Web apps are ready for prime time? For Microsoft to make its case against Google, Zoho, and others that produce free-for-general-use Web apps (although Google Apps' continued free state has become debatable of late), it has to demonstrate that it can carry not just the look-and-feel, but also the functionality and reliability, of traditional Office applications into the Web apps space. This is especially true if Microsoft truly does have a plan to earn revenue indirectly from the product, whether through advertising or commercial derivative services.

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The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) today announced the impending publication of the results of its microblogging study. In a peek forward, the Institute revealed that most respondents using Google-owned "lifecasting" service Jaiku are either very bland, or are not using the service properly.

According to the Institute, the five most common status updates on the service are:

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Three laptop computers, all of them cool-looking, all with well-respected brands, all have the features you want, all sell for the same price. This isn't going to be a toy for you; it will be, for at least the next few years, the engine for your work and your livelihood. How do you make a purchasing decision? You check online to see which one is the better performer, and which one other customers prefer.

Five Web browsers, all of them cool-looking, all with well-respected brands, all have the features you want, all of them...are free. But this isn't going to be a newspaper reader or a Twitter feed carrier for you; it will be, for at least the next few weeks, the engine for your work and your productivity. Sure, you'll install all of them. But which one will you install as your default, and which one will you trust with your everyday applications?

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After several months of intense research, helped along by literally hundreds of reader suggestions, Betanews has revised and updated its testing suite for Windows-based Web browser performance. The result is the Comprehensive Relative Performance Index (CRPI). If it's "creepy" to you, that's fine.

We've kept one very important element of our testing from the very beginning: We take a slow Web browser that you might not be using much anymore, and we pick on its sorry self as our test subject. We base our index on the assessed speed of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista SP2 -- the slowest browser still in common use. For every test in the suite, we give IE7 a 1.0 score. Then we combine the test scores to derive a CRPI index number that, in our estimate, best represents the relative performance of each browser compared to IE7. So for example, if a browser gets a score of 6.5, we believe that once you take every important factor into account, that browser provides 650% the performance of IE7.

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The problem with sleeping giants in recent years is that "terrible resolve" hasn't necessarily gotten them very far. Of course, this applies outside the information technology industry as well. But not even the Internet -- the biggest revolutionary IT technology since the personal computer -- is creditable to any one major player or allied force. Historians will note that almost every company or group to attain success through the Internet did so either 1) completely by accident, and/or 2) without any substantive plan as to what to do with that success once it attained it.

But the last great "sleeping giant" episode in the history of the IT industry was one of absolute, intentional, and steadfast resolve. The landscape of our lives and work has been shaped by this chain of events. It was triggered by WordPerfect, and the terrible resolve was manifest in Microsoft Office. I watched from very close range as, within a span of mere months, the axis powers that commanded respect and even awe -- WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE, and Harvard Graphics -- deflated to mere also-ran status. Their manufacturers, in an often comical display of poor timing and miscommunication, self-destructed.
As a result today, when you ask businesses worldwide why they use Microsoft Office, the majority of responses you'll get say it's because it's the productivity suite for Windows. And when you ask those same businesses why they use Windows, the answer is because it's the operating system that runs Office.

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