Category Archives: Software for the cloud

May 21 2013

Cloud Computing: it’s about trust!

Google announced that it will discontinue its very popular GoogleReader service by July 1, 2013. For many people, this was a real shock. GoogleReader is perceived as one of the most useful tools out of the Google application portfolio and many users built their daily news consumption completely on this service.

A journalist of one of the biggest German computer magazines (C’T, Computer Technik) found direct words for Google’s announcement: “The sunset of GoogleReader kills any trust in Google.” But why are people so upset? It’s not the first time that Google has stopped one if its services. Actually, since Larry Page took over, services have been discontinued on a frequent basis. I think, the reason for the users to be angry now is the fact that nobody expected that Google would get rid of one of its most popular services on such short notice.

However, transparency never was Google’s strength anyway.

Lets take this move from Google as an opportunity to discuss what we can learn about the relationship of cloud service providers and consumers.

First of all lets discuss why Google is doing this: because they don’t make money with GoogleReader. Google’s business model is to sell advertisements. Most Google services are only vehicles to reach users or gather data to either sell or use to better customize the advertisements and commercial banners for certain users. GoogleReader seemed not valuable enough to support this business model.

So, one important lesson we can learn is to always understand the service provider’s business model and how this is supported by the service you plan to consume.

Next, we can think who are regular clients of this service provider. Is that service provider targeting mainly users or large enterprise clients? In the large enterprise space, continuity of services is considered very important. Migration to or from a certain service can cost a fortune and steps are well planned and usually long term. In the end, user space providers tend to be more on the bleeding edge of technology, including the risk of failing or discontinuing a service.

Who is the regular client base of a service provider and how do I fit in there?

Although Google mainly serves the user area with its services, it tried to target larger companies with its GoogleDocs and GMail services, too. I don’t know if the end of GoogleReader was a very smart move for them to succeed in this space.

Apr 16 2012

Microsoft versus OpenOffice: Not the battle of the future!

Anyone remember Super Audio CD (SACD)? Or Audio DVD (ADVD)? Those formats once had a battle about which would succeed the Audio CD as the primary media for audio content. However, after the invention of MP3 and its wide distribution, disc formats became obsolete.

When Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD had a similar battle about who would be the next primary video media, experts already talked about a war where there was nothing to win for anybody. It was predicted that the Internet would become that primary media and that hard media such as discs or tapes would no longer be of any importance. Well, Blu-ray Discs did gain some market share, but only temporarily, as we look back today. Download portals, and also IPTV and video-on-demand offerings are slowly coming and will, for sure, get their pieces of the cake.

LibreOffice 3.5.1 came out recently, and Apache OpenOffice with the help of IBM will release a new version (4.0) approximately at the end of the year. These two alternative office suites run another attack on Microsoft’s dominance of the office software sector. But is this really a battle that is worth fighting for?

First of all, this battle is almost impossible to win. Not only that Microsoft’s dominant market share is equal to a de-facto industry standard, the office documents are mainly based on Microsoft’s proprietary document formats, which are often non-disclosed and therefore hard for non-Microsoft applications to interpret correctly. I think that any success of alternative office suites raise and fall with their ability to import and export Microsoft formats properly.

But, is this really the battlefield of the future? I don’t think so.

The actual battlefield about the future of software is in the cloud!

As Andreas Groth (@andreasgroth) and I mentioned in several earlier blog posts, the final goal of software evolution is to be web-based. There are several reasons for that: Web-based applications are easy to access (from any device), they are cheap to maintain and they support our new requirements in terms of collaboration and content sharing more easily as any local installed app does.

In regards to office software, all vendors had to start their development almost from zero again, which makes this race so interesting. Regardless, if we look at Microsoft’s Office 365, IBM Docs (formally known as LotusLive Symphony) or Google Docs, they all have in common that they were more or less developed from scratch. But beside the big three, there is a high momentum in that area to make applications accessible from a simple browser. Several examples are VMware AppBlast, Guacamole, and LibreOffice, which all use technology based on HTML-5.

But what will be the criteria to succeed in the cloud?

There is no doubt, that any office software needs to fulfil the productivity basics. I don’t think that cloud-based software must implement all fancy features of Office 2010, but it must enable the user to fulfil day-to-day tasks, including the capability to import and export office documents, display them properly, and run macros.

In terms of collaboration, cloud-based software needs to provide added value to any desktop- based application. It should be easily possible to share and exchange documents with coworkers.

But the most important factor will be its integration capabilities. Desktop and office workloads will not be moved into the cloud from one day to the other. There will be a certain time frame where the use of cloud-based applications start to grow, but the majority of people is still using locally installed applications. Being well integrated, both with the local installed software and also with server- based collaboration tools, will be the key factor for success. This is why I see Microsoft in a far better position than Google, although Google Docs has been around for quite some time and has started to become interesting, feature-wise.

IBM seems to be on the correct track. Its integration of IBM Docs into IBM Connections and IBM SmartCloud for Social Business (formally known as LotusLive), which can be tested in the IBM Greenhouse, looks very promising.

Summary

The new battlefield will be in the cloud, and although Microsoft did its homework, the productivity software market is changing. There are more significant solutions and vendors available than in the years before. If they play their cards right and provide good integration together with an attractive license model and collaboration features, they could get their share of (Microsoft’s) cake.