There’s been a new round of noise in what I like to call the “What is the Cloud?” discussion.  It never ceases to amaze me that so many people seem stuck on this one question, despite the fact that having an answer to it is not the asset people seem to think it is.  The cloud is evolving, with or without us, and is doing so based on the needs and demands of developers.

So it was with some amusement that I caught wind of the “secret” open cloud manifesto being circulated to some of the top companies.  My boss has posted the Microsoft stance on the open cloud manifesto, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

The press seems to have glommed onto this meme with quite a bit of coverage.  I didn’t know Steven was so popular.  Perhaps I need to hang around him more.  Darryl Taft at eWeek had a very insightful article, which took a very unexpected turn.  He admitted that journalists have a bit of a bias against Microsoft, and when it comes to us talking about things like open processes and standards, they can’t help themselves but be skeptical.  Here’s the money quote:

“…it’s a whole new world. And not only has the web — and increasingly the cloud — forced Microsoft to become more open and interoperable, so has the sheer force of customer and developer demand.”

That’s spot on.  The Hatorade was fine back in the 90s, but in case everyone missed the memo, the web kind of kicked our ass, and we have made a very strong effort to work with standards, embrace the needs of our developers, and deliver high quality products and services to our customers based on those demands.

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I have professed my love for ASP.NET MVC, but have come to hate the documentation by blog.  I have been checking Amazon and the local book stores for a book that would help spell out many of the topics not covered in Scottgu’s blog posts.

Here at Mix09, Scott Hanselman is giving out links to the first chapter of his forthcoming book, coauthored with ScottGu, Phil Haack, and Rob Conrey.  Apparently they are doing this under creative commons, and want you to have it.  “First chapter?,” you ask.  What’s the big deal?  Well…it’s 185 pages, and is a start to finish app creation.  That is how I want to learn this stuff, and was psyched to see it.  I am working through the content myself, but wanted to share the link.

The book title is “Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0” and they have a link to the free chapter.  Enjoy.

So, I’m a big nerd.  I know this.  I love watching the new Battlestar Galactica.  Without question the best show on TV.  I love it so much, I wanted to have the song (if you’re a fan, you know *the* song) as my ring tone.  Doing some casual searching turned up nothing.  Doing some more serious searching turned up one really bad version.  Even more searching, this time on the BSG Forums, turned up one link to a file that was OK, but not what I wanted.

It was at this point that I realized it was only 11 at night, so I had some time to kill.  Thus began my quest to create the coolest ringtone ever.  Seriously, I’m a legend in my own mind (for sure), but this was quite the task.  Discovered some pretty cool services along the way, and came to understand some of the intricacies of YouTube.  2+ hours of work later, and I have labored to produce this:

 The Cylon Song

Please do let me know if you use it.

One of the things I am going to spending my time doing during Mix09 is talking to customers about what they find exciting, and more specifically about our cloud computing efforts.  Not really sure how this is going to turn out, but that’s what makes it so exciting.  Armed with nothing other than a Flip camera and my stunning charm (<g>), I will accost Mix attendees.  Watch out…you might be next.

I cannot even begin to understand the logic of this design decision.  When I got to my room at the Venetian, I was surprised by a couple of things.  First was the size.  It’s a business suite.  Second, the fact that the bed pulled out of the wall…in the corner.  That was a little off putting.  However, the clock is what made me angry.

The clock wasn’t plugged in, so that was the first order of business.  I tried for 10-15 minutes to figure out how to set it.  Being an engineer, I simply couldn’t admit defeat.  Ultimately, I was tired and called the front desk.  It turns out that this particular clock needs a screwdriver (a SCREWDRIVER) to set the time. You can set the alarm fine, but in order to set the time, you need to remove the bottom of the box.  WTF?  They offered to send up an engineer to set it, but knowing what  “truck roll” would cost, I couldn’t, in good conscience, do that.  I opted for the wake up call.

Wow.

I am always interested in things that we all notice but don’t quite put together for what they really are.  I think we can all agree that the economy is tough right now.  I’m a little shielded from that with my job and employer doing well enough, so that makes things a little easier.  However, I know that it’s tough times out there for many people, and that bums me out.

My wife came by for a quick visit and we turned it into lunch with daddy at work.  During the conversation, she shared that she had been at the mall with the kids.  She also noted that “the ratio of men to women in the play area is going up during the middle of the week.”  Just last week, when I was on daddy day care last week, I noticed that there were quite a few dudes there as well.

So with the economy on the skids, upward goes the number of men with nothing to do in the middle of the day.  With an eye toward painting a silver lining on things, at least they are getting to spend more time with their kids.

I recently delivered a talk for a group of venture capitalists who wanted a primer on the cloud.  It was, so I thought, a pretty straightforward task to put together this discussion.  I have written about the motivations of those building cloud platforms, so I figured I could just transpose that content to slides.  Unfortunately, life often doesn’t work out the way we would like when you think there is an “easy” answer.

I wanted to ensure that there was some relevancy of my content not just to the VCs in the room, but also for their CEOs and CTOs, with whom they would undoubtedly share this content.  Further, I knew that I had to make it simple enough to fit into the allotted time, but meaty enough that everyone took something away from the call.  Given the time constraint, I focused on Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure.  Lastly, given that VCs are investing and looking for ideas, I had to put on my old investor hat and present some high level whitespace analysis with some noted interesting companies.

I think the key takeaways would be that Amazon has built some very cool technology and they continue to innovate.  However, that must be tempered with some cost considerations (tied to growth) and the fact that the platform itself doesn’t solve any hard problems for you.  Google, on the other hand, has little in the way of cost concerns (they have a stated goal of supporting up to 5 million page views for free), but what you can do with the framework is pretty limiting in the context of the richness of applications now possible.  Lastly, Azure is a contender, but we have some things yet to prove, and of course, we are late to the game.  It’s still very early days, but there are some cool things happen in the clouds, both at the platform level, and at the “built on top of” level.

This past weekend, I endeavored to take my children to the Thomas the Tank Engine live show that was going on here in Seattle.  Hat tip and double barrel to Scott Hanselman for tweeting his going to this a few weeks back.  Kids loved it, but the parents were a bit worn out when done.

During the course of the show, I realized that, like many children’s stories, there are lessons to be learned.  I decided to take the main themes, and surface them for business and entrepreneurs:

• Be Useful – Dave McClure had a great shirt I saw at last week’s TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable: “Make something people want.”  It’s a Paul Graham quote, but very appropriate.  Be useful and your product or service will stand on it’s own.  A friend of mine was asking if he should hire a PR firm for his new company, and whether hungry trumps deep vertical experience.  I told him to make something people wanted and focus on that.  No amount of PR can sell a bad bag of rocks.
  
• Have Fun When It Rains – These are some tough economic times we are in right now, but it’s during this time when you find out who the innovators are and who the imitators are.  To steal a line from Jason Calacanis, there are entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs.  The entrepreneurs will shine in this economy and come out the other side much stronger.
  
• Don’t Cause Confusion and Delay – Just get it done.  Someone asked Brad Feld during his stop in Seattle what advice he would give to startups.  He said “just do it.”  There’s plenty of reasons to not do something, and if you try to get approval for whatever it is you want to do, you will hear all of those reasons from a great many people.  Hate flakes like to rain down on new ideas.  Those are not people you need around you, nor should you be one of those people.  Just start working on it, and release often and early.
  
• Be Brave – As a corollary to the above, fortune favors the brave, so get out there and do something people think can’t be done.  I’m often quoted as saying that I’m the guy you drop behind enemy lines with a knife and three bullets, and the orders to “just figure it out.”  If you aren’t brave, those orders, and lack of appropriate equipment, will leave you scared and cowering.  Pick your objective, and get it done.
  
• Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help – They say the best founding teams have 2-3 members.  Anything more than that becomes unmanageable, and you will ultimately end up with 2-3 founders, but minus a few friends.  If you are thinking you are going to venture out on your own, ask for help.  If you are stuck, ask for help.  My late father used to like to tell me that people thought he was the “smartest mutherfucker alive.”  He made it clear to me, however, that you don’t need to know all the answers, but simply to know where to get the answers, and do so quickly.  Whether that means from a book, or from a person, it’s OK to not have all the answers or to need help.  In fact, you will find that the more input you get from people, your idea will ultimately be better for it.