keithwarren

I keep hearing this same line over and over, that Microsoft should stick with the enterprise which is what they are good at.

For anyone with more than 10 years experience, this kind of statement is hilarious because not that long ago Microsoft was laughed at as an 'enterprise' software company. Oracle, IBM, Tibco, SAS - these were enterprise companies and Microsoft was a consumer software company.

But that by and large is unimportant history for what they face now. There has been a sea change in the relationship large corporations have with their information technology departments. For most of the time since computers became a basic necessity for white collar workers, the IT group dictated what devices could and should be used. They bought specific laptops or desktops and that was it. If you wanted to use a personal information management device like a Palm Pilot or Windows CE device, you had to plug it into the computer at the office. That meant IT had to approve the device because they needed to ensure its compatibility with their Windows setup and your enterprise infrastructure.

I dont need to regurgitate what happened, but needless to say we no longer need that tether and devices now speak directly to the services. This frees management and workers to buy the devices they need and want. Upper management gets an iPhone or iPad and they want to work with it, IT has to bend. I have seen this in our consulting practice over and over - IT did not want to allow iPads but C*O level folks insisted and voila, we now support iPads. IT did not come around, they were forced by good consumer devices that just worked.

Microsoft recognizes this sea change and knows that they have to be a player and a big one in the consumer device market as this market is now dictating to IT, not the other way around. Consumer devices now drive the choices in the enterprise so Microsoft cannot give up here, they have to double down.

He was doing real good up until the last paragraph, then he threw in some playground BS and called half the country stupid because they don't agree with him. It added nothing to his point, in fact it detracted from it.

I have yet to see a solid discussion of wealth inequality that removes the outliers. Given that 85 people have half the worlds wealth, it would appear to me that a study which looks at the numbers without those people would be more interesting in helping us understand how our systems and markets are moving wealth for 99.999% of us.

Even still, the goal should not be balanced wealth but continual upward mobility for all people - or more aptly distance from poverty. There will always be rich and poor but the standard of living and equity of opportunity for the poor is what we should focus on. It is more important that a poor kid have good education, healthcare and living standards than it is to rebuke the rich guy for having a yacht. It seems we are in this stage where we recognize something isn't right but we are immaturely blaming the rich guy and saying he should give his money to the poor kid rather than finding real solutions to the plight of the poor kid.

I imagine that Satya would know the people well and where he wants them so we may see some shuffling in the next 6-9 months. Scott is a great public persona and clicks with developers far more than Soma. Soma is stronger operationally and there are going to be other ops critical roles to fill because Satya's elevation to CEO will certainly cause some high level people to leave.

Going to be an interesting next couple years.

Background != Direction

All this banter about it being a bad choice or a good choice because Satya's current role is enterprise focused is just goofy. Had Elop been chosen we would not be acting as if Microsoft is only a phone company now and is abandoning the enterprise.

I think an interesting side effect of this; his vacating of the Cloud/Enterprise role provides a natural succession up the chain for Scott Guthrie. It also gives Scott (who has more of an effect on the Microsoft dev community than any other person) a direct pipeline and solid personal relationship with the CEO.

Xamarin lets you write in C# and still build 100% native apps. If you have not looked at C#, coming from ObjC it will feel like you just shed 100 pounds of weight.

Not sure this should count being that it is not available

Lumia 1020 represents probably the biggest leap in phone+camera tech we have seen. Given the ubiquity of this kind of tech, to make such a leap is kind of a big deal.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

It is a great book written by one of the great computer scientists of our time. It tracks the evolution of code and computing from morse code and braille on to number systems, early processors and even into how processors handle this information. When I hire someone for nearly any position, I buy them this book.

*Don't let the title fool you, this is not some discussion about high level languages, this is the down and dirty stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

For video editing, proc and gpu are actually the important parts once you hit a certain point with ram and disk. Think about it, 4K videos in raw form are about 15gb per minute so you need a threshold of swapping and loading with ram and disk that allows you to move data in and out fast enough so the editing can be done in ram but you experience no lag as the user.

With disk in PCIe and a good controller you are getting around 1gb per second disk action so you have more than enough headroom.

I like my Surface but what they are showing and doing in that video is not truly editing. Showing raw or changing colors is not exactly the bar you need to get over.

I actually dont, but I leased office space in a post-prod studio for a long time and am still friends with the owner. There is a demand for raw horsepower on a level many people dont understand.

You ever tried to edit 4K video? Real time editing is very important to post-production studios and when you are adding effects, rendering etc in a time sensitive environment - and you are a Final Cut person - then this is a great tool.

This is not for your average dev or photo person, this is legitimately a 'Pro' machine aimed at very small a subset of Apple customers who actually mean quite a bit to the company. It is a quality perception game, when Hollywood is using your stuff you gain a certain mystique.

So because there were rumors that Alan Mulally was slated for the role - and now there are rumors he will stay at Ford, there is a stalemate?

I read the article hoping for something informed, something from the inside - a leak even. What this is, is rather boring speculation.

I even find the dismissal of Elop as an option curious given that internal structural changes that were made after the acquisition announcement - the akward positioning in the org chart between he and Julie Larson Green seemed to suggest that one of the two of them may be a strong candidate for the position.

Personally as a shareholder and someone whose consulting practice is very much tied to the fortunes of Microsoft - I would love to see Scott Guthrie in charge. Alas this may not be his time up to the plate. Maybe 5-10 years from now the road will be paved for him. He moves from Azure onto something bigger like Office or Windows - continues his success and the reins are handed over.

tldr; Don't be evil is the Google motto and they are supporting some conservative groups. Conservatives are all Koch brother puppets and the Kochs are evil, therefore Google is evil.

I actually ask Miquel about this very thing at Evolve last April and he said they would love to do something like that but Apple TOS forbid it. That is your impediment.

Microsoft isn't buying them because devdiv is not a profit driver for Microsoft. Enabling devs to build for other platforms is not a profit driver for them.

They will only buy Xamarin defensively. If they feel like someone else might gobble them up and they will lose access to dev mindshare around c# and mobile.

3.5 years ago is the key. Xamarin has come a long way in the past 12 months, not to mention the past 42.

Developers who know this have grown considerably in that period as well.

On an aside, 90/hr for a competent dev is cheap. I know most people on HN don't make a salary that equates to that but freelancers have an entirely different set of concerns and 90 is low.

Microsoft is a possible suitor and that follows logic with what we saw in the Nokia purchase.

That said, I still think Amazon will buy Xamarin.

For me it has to go beyond programming. When you hire me to help automate some process or improve some system, you are going to get a good programmer but you are also going to get someone who seeks to deeply understand your business and find ways to improve beyond what you put in front of me.

If 'outsource' to someone in another part of the world your need for a detailed specification is much higher, your need to mitigate communications risks are much higher. Something I have trouble putting into words but I know from experience is there - when I am working on some process I try to understand it deeply and ask questions that are often more business related than technical. Technology is a means to solving business challenges and you have to be part analyst and part developer to approach problems that way. A coder across the world who needs a very detailed spec will almost never give you that benefit.

.NET has the same feature for Oracle and several other databases

Yeah, I saw that and got a good laugh because SQL Server has done that for nearly a decade.

That is what 20 minutes on Instapage gets you. Long term this is not our branding (Pivotal is already taken) and we did not want to invest much time in the public site before we are ready to start marketing the system. That site was put up so there was at least some place people can go when put our name on an accelerator application or tell someone we meet what we are working on.

We putting about $500 dollars into AdWords just to see what CAC looked like and the sign up conversion rate was around 2%, certainly meager when we are talking about just asking for a name and email but alas, it served its purpose.

Any idea what the average storage take per user was?

Building a competitor as well (http://pivotal.ws)

My startup is in the same space as them and I can promise you that running our own storage is much cheaper. Azure and AWS run around 7K per month for 100tb.

When you factor redundacy I need to buy 200tb, factor in other server infrastructure with the cost of a 4TB drive running around 180 and I can spend 15K to buy 200TB of storage.

Put another way, we can own twice the storage capacity (or 1x mirrored) for roughly 2 months of S3 storage.

We are looking at 9.95, 19.95 and 35.95 a month based on storage levels and other benefits.

The 'other' benefits is something that sets us apart, with our service you get to choose some photos each month and we will mail 3x5 copies to you (or you can have them sent to someone else like parents or grandparents), monthly merchandising deals like 75% off a photo book or calendar.

I am, we know long term we will have to change the name and already have something lined up but we figured it best right now to keep the current name. Make a bunch of mistakes and then rebrand.

If you were an Everpix fan I would love to hear from you, our startup Pivotal (http://pivotal.ws) is doing something very similar and we would love to hear what you liked and didnt like about Everpix and how you would make it better.