Some of you may have seen this in the press and the Blogosphere recently, one of Microsofts Gold Partners in the US released a press release poking a little fun at some of the more serious business issues surrounding Business Apps hosted on the web.

http://www.intermedia.net/about-us/news/2006/google-apps.asp

Viewed in the right context the release does bring out some interesting points around business apps for users in a hosted environment. Essentially, in a busines context we see the following as important:

• Support - managed SLAs for uptime, round the clock and follow the sun support
• Security - again managed and contactable, also Trust and Privacy which drive important business decisions around Compliance
• Offline versus Online - an entire debate in itself!

This post could go on a bit but I have to be honest, I truly believe that competition is healthy. How can your company look good and demonstrate value to the customer without healthy competiition in all areas. All good stuff if you see any other commentary on this topic please send my way.

Cheers

Want to extend the useful economic life of your PC - get a compute cluster HPC server... With many new technologies people rave about the technology but forget the business case that drives compelling event and the purchase - this post looks at recent examples of how UK customers have justified their purchases of HPC clusters with Windows CCS.

So in my meetings with partners and customers to date it has been patently clear that there is pent up demand from many types of power users for more computing power. Whatsmore it is also clear that this power is not required all of the time and should be a shared resource for all types of users from researchers, engineers and marketing analysts to financial modellers, insurance liability assessors and academics. In one particular example, a UK business was stifling up to 20 workstations whilst critical modelling analysis was carried out. The business case, for them was based on incremental productivity and releasing those slave workstations allowing the users to get on with their normal day to day tasks - hard to believe but true!

On another note if you are intrigued about the new Office System then check out my colleague Chris Parkes' new blog at:

http://blogs.technet.com/chrisp/default.aspx

Enjoy!

So as an follow up to the blog I did a few weeks back on F1 use of MS technology (Offtopic Friday humour... http://blogs.technet.com/mikep/archive/2006/08/11/446043.aspx), check out the very cool steering wheel from Fiat as shown on Jason Langridge's blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonlan/archive/2006/08/26/724967.aspx

I can see those motoring and MS jokes may continue for a while..., great to see our Automotive group bringing the same functionality I enjoy at home and at work into an area where I still spend a lot of my working day.

Anyone fancy a little weekend work linking a few XBOX 360's together...saw this fabulously inspirational story on the BBC Technology site today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5287254.stm

Hmmm could we do HPC clusters on a networked set of 360's.....? Now I know this sounds silly but this was actually discussed at a recent meeting I went to with IBM...now there's a thing - the senior manager who came along and happened to hear that bit had some rather direct feedback for her employee:

"If this falls on it's ass, my foot is up your ass!" - nice! Maybe we will try more conventional methods of bringing clusters to the market then!

I was browing Robert Scoble's blog and caught this link to a great reference of 'How to get people talking about your product' - now this got me thinking around the whole process fo adoption and how many times do i hear businesses targeting customers in an inapprpriate manner that drives limited results. Have a read for yourself here:

http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Buzz.html

Scobles blog on the new start up tune for Vista was also pretty cool:

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/feed/

How many times have i heard MS get requests for one feature or another and yet always see different users of software do the same thing multiple ways.....hmmm.....you can please some people some of the time but not all of the...you get the picture!